Polymer Flooding: A Sustainable Enhanced Oil Recovery in the Current Scenery

摘要

This paper presents a simplified economical analysis of PETROBRAS' experience with the pilot project for polymer mobility control in the Carmópolis field, and an evaluation of the world and brasilian current scenery of this technology. The positive results of this pilot and the new world scenery of the oil industry, shown here, assure great potential of this technology, especially in a time marked by a rising oil prices and growing environmental and social conscience. The pilot project was aimed firstly to evaluate the fit of the polymer technology to Carmopólis field, considering the particular characteristics of the field regarding rock heterogeneities, oil type, water salinity, temperature, pressure, etc. A second goal was to obtain know-how in all the project phases like lab tests, design and operation in field scale and, finally, technical and economical analysis as a function of the additional oil recovered and the direct investment. This economic analysis is a starting point for more comprehensive economical evaluations. This economic evaluation closed the sequence and will be important to the possible future unfolds. This evaluation was done with a special criteria because of the operational typical difficulties of this kind of project. All the investment is justified by the fact of polymer injection to be, according the literature, the easiest application and one of the lowest cost of the incremental oil and besides, the onshore experience is the first step for the future offshore field application. This experience demonstrated that the injection process of polymer for mobility control is efficient even for heterogeneous reservoirs as Carmópolis field, and still, in a sustainable way, in other words, with increase of the oil production and reduction of the use of the water and consequentially of the water produced, and of the costs and of the environmental problems associated to this water, in agreement with the new world partner-environmental conscience.