Research into polymer injection timing for Bohai heavy oil reservoirs

Polymer flooding has been proven to effectively improve oil recovery in the Bohai Oil Field. However, due to high oil viscosity and significant formation heterogeneity, it is necessary to further improve the displacement effectiveness of polymer flooding in heavy oil reservoirs in the service life of offshore platforms. In this paper, the effects of the water/oil mobility ratio in heavy oil reservoirs and the dimensionless oil productivity index on polymer flooding effectiveness were studied utilizing relative permeability curves. The results showed that when the water saturation was less than the value, where the water/oil mobility ratio was equal to 1, polymer flooding could effectively control the increase of fractional water flow, which meant that the upper limit of water/oil ratio suitable for polymer flooding should be the value when the water/oil mobility ratio was equal to 1. Mean while, by injecting a certain volume of water to create water channels in the reservoir, the polymer flooding would be the most effective in improving sweep efficiency, and lower the fractional flow of water to the value corresponding to Delta J(max). Considering the service life of the platform and the polymer mobility control capacity, the best polymer injection timing for heavy oil reservoirs was optimized. It has been tested for reservoirs with crude oil viscosity of 123 and 70 mPa s, the optimum polymer flooding effectiveness could be obtained when the polymer floods were initiated at the time when the fractional flow of water were 10 % and 25 %, respectively. The injection timing range for polymer flooding was also theoretically analyzed for the Bohai Oil Field utilizing relative permeability curves, which provided methods for improving polymer flooding effectiveness.