SPE Edmonton Distinguished Lecture

Polymer flooding has experienced remarkable expansion of application in recent years. Beginning with the massive Daqing project that started in Northeast China in 1996 to the impressive use of horizontal wells to recover 1000-10,000-cp oil in Canada (beginning ~2004) to the record-breaking success of the Milne Point project on Alaska’s North Slope (beginning in 2018). Although some have claimed that polymer flooding is a "mature" technology, substantial advances have been made in just the past few years that have allowed polymer flooding to be much more cost-effective than it was even 10 years ago. In this lecture, the audience will learn the conditions where polymer flooding will provide the greatest impact and hear about the advances that have been made to allow the technology to be cost-effective in recovering oil with viscosities up to 10,000 cp and in reservoirs with temperatures up to 120°C. New records are being broken with the updated version of this technology. For example, in one pattern at Milne Point, produced water cuts dropped from ~70% during waterflooding before the project to less than 5% during polymer injection. In another pattern, over 0.3 PV of polymer solution was injected to displace 850-cp oil, while significant produced water and polymer breakthrough was only detected recently. This lecture will describe those advances and help the audience determine if polymer flooding is right for them. The talk will inform the listeners how to avoid the pitfalls that have limited the technology in past applications.

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