NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF AN ENHANCED OIL RECOVERY PROCESS USING POLYMER NANOHYBRIDS IN A COLOMBIAN HEAVY OIL FIELD

Colombia needs to incorporate new reserves. That is a great opportunity to exploit heavy and extra-heavy oil fields because these reservoirs have the highest percentage of the original oil in place and the country<acute accent>s current production. In this sense, for this study, the Chichimene field located in the Llanos Orientales basin was selected, which has carried out a waterflooding process since 2013 in extra-heavy crude oil of 9 degrees API and viscosity between 500 and 1,200 cP from the San Fernando- T2 formation. According to the literature review, the T2 formation is heterogeneous, with permeabilities between 500 -1600 mD, a net thickness of 320 ft, a temperature between 185 - 210 degrees F, and 6,000 ft of depth approximately. Due to the high oil viscosity and the heterogeneity of the T2 reservoir, in 2015, a polymer injection pilot started to improve the water/oil mobility ratio and the recovery factor of the pilot sector. The results of this polymer flooding pilot were successful because the available sulfonated polymers are competitive in obtaining a positive EOR effect. To study the water/oil mobility relationship and other important mechanisms such as wettability, interfacial tension, and stability against mechanical, chemical, and thermal degradative effects. This article analyzed the experimental study (fluid-fluid and rock- fluid) and study numerical simulation processes of polymer nanohybrids injection and sulfonated polymer flooding, compared to the Waterflooding, in the T2 formation of the Chichimene field. Therefore, a conceptual stochastic numerical simulation model was created with a chemical reaction model incorporated that was fed with ranges of parameters such as concentration, viscosity, and rock-fluid parameters like inaccessible pore volume (IPV), adsorption, resistance factor (RF), and residual resistance factor (RRF) of the selected conventional polymers and polymer nanohybrids, together with operational parameters such as injection flow rate and polymer size slug (obtained from the literature), to perform a sensitivity analysis that allowed identifying the parameters that have greater impact on the performance of the injection of nanohybrid polymers on the increase in the recovery factor. The numerical simulation results present an incremental production of 3.46 million barrels of oil for the polymer nanohybrid injection, and 2.16 million barrels of oil for the polymer flooding, compared to the baseline of the water injection process. That represents an Incremental Recovery Factor of 1.8 % for the polymer nanohybrid solution and 2.9 % for the sulfonated polymer solution. The sensitivity analysis infers the main difference corresponds to the viscosifying power of the nanohybrid with the benefits of nanotechnology. These characteristics have been widely disseminated in studies of the state of the art of the technology. According to numerical simulation, the injection of polymer nanohybrids could be an alternative to sulfonated HPAM polymer flooding for improved recovery in high-temperature and deep heavy oil fields.