Review on chemical enhanced oil recovery using polymer flooding: Fundamentals, experimental and numerical simulation

The EOR techniques are employed to recover more oil from mature reservoirs after the primary and secondary oil production stages. Polymer flooding as a chemical EOR method involves adding polymer molecules in order to increase water viscosity. Increasing water viscosity will improve the mobility ratio of injected fluid to reservoir fluid toward a more favorable value. Therefore, vertical and areal sweep efficiencies are increased compared to typical water flooding. Polymer flooding will be most effective if applied in the early stages of a water flood while the mobile oil saturation is still high. Polymer is also a critical component when considering other chemical EOR technologies such as alkaline-polymer or alkaline-surfactant-polymer. The present study covers two main parts. In the first part, fundamental of polymer flooding as it related to experimental work and simulation are discussed. The challenge of polymer flooding applications in high temperature and high salinity (HTHS) environment is also discussed in this part. In the second part, the synergy of polymer with surfactant and alkaline as chemical enhancing oil recovery (CEOR) methods is discussed. © 2020