Combining small well spacing with polymer flooding to improve oil recovery of marginal reservoirs

Because of low volumetric sweep efficiency and large difference in injection and production rate of each zone, the recovery factor of water flooding is very low in some continental and heterogeneous sandstone oil fields, especially when the reservoir continuity is poor, permeability low and high permeability variation between different zones. Due to the amount of incremental producible oil is not large enough to further drill infill wells economically, drilling infill wells and performing polymer flooding simultaneously was proposed and a pilot test has been concluded. The paper introduces the laboratory studies on selection of polymer injection parameters and project design optimization. According to these studies, a pilot test of "Combining Small Well Spacing with Polymer Flooding" was conducted. The well spacing is 100 meters, the zones with a thickness of less than 1 meter and with a permeability rage of 5 to 100 md were combined together and put on development. Both lab studies and pilot results show that the volumetric sweep efficiency was greatly increased, especially after applying separate zone injection measures in polymer injectors based on injection profile surveys and tracer test data. The pilot test indicates that the technique of combining infill wells with polymer flooding is economically feasible with 10% OOIP incremental recovery at a production cost of $10/bbl. Copyright 2006, Society of Petroleum Engineers.