Stability and Behavior in Carbonate Cores for New Enhanced-Oil-Recovery Polymers at Elevated Temperatures in Hard Saline Brines

Abstract

Summary The goal of this work was to identify viable polymers for use in the polymer flooding of high-temperature carbonate reservoirs with hard, saline brines. This study extensively examined recent enhanced-oil-recovery (EOR) polymers for stability, including new 2-acrylamido-tertbutylsulfonic acid (ATBS) polymers with a high degree of polymerization, scleroglucan, n-vinylpyrrolidone (NVP)-based polymers, and hydrophobic associative polymers. For each polymer, stability experiments were performed over a 2-year period under oxygen-free conditions (less than 1 ppb) at various temperatures up to 180°C in brines with total dissolved solids (TDS) ranging from 0.69 to 24.4%, including divalent cations from 0.034 to 2.16%. Use of the Arrhenius analysis was a novel feature of this work. This rarely used method allows a relatively rapid assessment of the long-term stability of EOR polymers. Rather than wait years or decades for results from conventional stability studies at the reservoir temperature, reliable estimates of the time-temperature stability relations were obtained within 2 years. Arrhenius analysis was used to project polymer-viscosity half-lives at the target reservoir temperature of 99°C. The analysis suggests that a set of ATBS polymers will exhibit a viscosity half-life over 5 years at 120°C and over 50 years at 99°C, representing a novel finding of this work and a major advance for extending polymer flooding to higher temperatures. For five polymers that showed potential for application at higher temperatures, corefloods were performed under anaerobic conditions. Another novel feature of this work was that anaerobic floods were performed without using chemical oxygen scavengers, chemical stabilizing packages, or chelating agents (that are feared to alter rock properties). Using carbonate cores and representative conditions, corefloods were performed to evaluate polymer retention, rheology in porous media, susceptibility to mechanical degradation, and the residual resistance factor for each of the polymers at 99°C.