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Abstract

Summary

The Ithaca-operated Captain field is located offshore in the U.K. sector of the North Sea and is made up of sandstone reservoirs of high quality and permeability. Produced water re-injection maintains pressure via water injection wells in reservoirs containing high viscosity oils (typically, ∼ 40 to 140cP). This unfavourable mobility ratio water over oil of 40 has resulted in early water breakthrough at the production wells, strong water coning and large volumes of bypassed oil. Fortunately, the clean, high net to gross Captain sands make these reservoirs good candidates for enhanced oil recovery using polymer flooding. To apply this process, Anionic polyacrylamide (HPAM) in liquid form was chosen as the preferred chemical and has been used since 2011. This application of polymer flooding has proven to be extremely successful in Captain, with significant acceleration of the waterflood bypassed reserves resulting in a substantial increase in incremental oil compared with the waterflood recovery.

Following the commercial success of these initial polymer floods, has come a desire to expand the original polymer flooding process to other areas of the field. When implementing this expansion, maintaining the target polymer viscosity is of utmost importance in order to preserve the desired mobility ratio and maintain the sweep efficiency of the process. Polymer viscosity loss may result from a number of different degradation mechanisms and the question of whether the polymer is able to retain its viscosity within the reservoir became a key uncertainty for future expansion.

To determine the degree of degradation of the polymer required a novel sampling and testing procedure. In this scheme, the sampling and measurement of produced polymer viscosity was carried out despite significant operational and technical challenges.

During execution of the sampling, the primary requirement was to enable produced polymer sampling from the sandface of a long horizontal and operational production well, without degrading the polymer during the sampling procedure. This sample then had to be maintained in anaerobic conditions to ensure no chemical degradation occurred during transfer for laboratory testing.

The laboratory testing results demonstrated that the HPAM polymer product used on Captain maintains considerable viscosity in the reservoir, having travelled for 3 years though the reservoir over a distance of more than 500 feet. These results clearly demonstrate that limited mechanical, chemical and/or biological degradation had occurred in the reservoir, giving increased confidence in our investment decisions to proceed with future polymer floods in the Captain field.

© EAGE Publications BV
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2021-04-19
2024-04-19

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A Novel Sampling and Testing Procedure to Confirm Polymerflood Viscosity Retention at the Captain Field
Conference Proceedings 2021, 1 (2021); https://doi.org/10.3997/2214-4609.202133039
/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.202133039
/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.202133039
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