The Use of Tracer Data To Determine Polymer-Flooding Effects in a Heterogeneous Reservoir, 8 Torton Horizon Reservoir, Matzen Field, Austria

Abstract

Summary: Polymer-injection pilot projects aim at reducing the uncertainty and risk of full-field polymer-flood implementation. The interpretation of polymer-pilot projects is challenging because of the complexity of the process and fluids moving out of the polymer-pilot area. The interpretation is increasingly more complicated with the heterogeneity of the reservoir. In the polymer pilot performed in the 8 Torton Horizon (TH) reservoir of the Matzen field in Austria, a polymer-injection well surrounded by a number of production wells was selected. A tracer was injected 1 week before polymer injection. The tracer showed that the flow field in the reservoir was dramatically modified with increasing amounts of polymer injected. Despite short breakthrough times of 4 to 10 weeks observed for the tracer, polymer breakthrough occurred only after more than 12 months although injection and production rates were not substantially changed. The tracer signal indicated that the reservoir is heterogeneous, with high flow velocities occurring along a number of flow paths with a limited volume that are strongly connecting the injection and production wells. By injecting polymers, the mobility of the polymer-augmented water was reduced compared with water injection, and led to flow diversion into adjacent layers. The tracer response showed that the speed of the tracer moving from injection to production wells was reduced with increasing amount of polymer injected. This response was used to assess the changes of the amount of water flowing from the injection well to production wells. After a match for the tracer curve was obtained, adsorption, residual resistance factor (RRF), and dispersivity were calculated. The results showed that, even for heterogeneous reservoirs without good conformance of the pilot, the critical parameters for polymer-injection projects can be assessed by analyzing tracer and polymer response. These parameters are required to determine whether implementation of polymer injection at field scale is economically attractive. Along the flow path that is connecting injection and production well, as shown by the tracer response, an incremental recovery of approximately 8% was achieved. The polymer retention and inaccessible pore volume (IPV) in the reservoir were in the same range as in corefloods. Incremental oil recovery caused by acceleration along the flow path was estimated at approximately 20% of the overall incremental oil production caused by polymer injection and 80% was attributed to improved sweep efficiency.