Uncertainty Quantification of a Chemically Enhanced Oil Recovery Process: Applying the Probabilistic Collocation Method to a Surfactant-Polymer Flood

Abstract

Abstract Uncertainty in surfactant-polymer flooding is an important challenge to the wide scale implementation of this process. Any successful design of this enhanced oil recovery process will necessitate a good understanding of uncertainty. Thus it is essential to have the ability to quantify this uncertainty in an efficient manner. Monte Carlo Simulation is the traditional uncertainty quantification approach that is used for quantifying parametric uncertainty. However, the convergence of Monte Carlo simulation is relatively low requiring a large number of realizations to converge. This study proposes the use of the probabilistic collocation method in parametric uncertainty quantification for surfactant-polymer flooding using four synthetic reservoir models. Four sources of uncertainty were considered: the chemical flood residual oil saturation, surfactant and polymer adsorption and the polymer viscosity multiplier. The output parameter approximated is the recovery factor. The output metrics were the probability density function and the first two moments. These were compared with the results obtained from Monte Carlo simulation over a large number of realizations. Two methods for solving for the coefficients of the output parameter polynomial chaos expansion are compared: Gaussian quadrature and linear regression. The linear regression approach used two types of sampling: Gaussian quadrature nodes and Chebyshev derived nodes. In general, the probabilistic collocation method was applied successfully to quantify the uncertainty in the recovery factor. Applying the method using Gaussian quadrature produced more accurate results compared with using linear regression with quadrature nodes. Applying the method using linear regression with Chebyshev derived sampling also performed relatively well. Possible enhancements to improve the performance of the probabilistic collocation method were discussed. These enhancements include: improved sparse sampling, approximation order independent sampling and using arbitrary random input distribution that could be more representative of reality.