Experimental studies of surfactant-polymer flooding: An application case investigation

A great deal of oil field is currently produced using water flooding and the water cut has reached a high level, which requires enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques to improve the recovery. Surfactant-polymer (SP) flooding is the combination of surfactant flooding and polymer flooding. The polymer is added to increase the viscosity and viscoelasticity of the fluid while the surfactant is included to decrease the oil–water interfacial tension and change the wettability. Although the mechanism of SP flooding has been deeply investigated, the application of SP flooding on a specific oil field requires the selection of optimal SP system. Therefore, for the first time, we performed a series of experiments to determine the optimal SP system for high water-cut oil field. In the injection capability experiment, we observe that the SP system is injected into the core with less resistance compared with single polymer solution. In the flooding experiment, regardless of the polymer types, the improvement of recovery becomes significant when the injected PVs increases. SP flooding shows the higher improvement of recovery compared with single polymer flooding or surfactant flooding. Based on the performance of recovery improvement, we recommend the optimal SP system for the studied case is the combination of DQ-TSRP01 polymer and surfactant. The optimal injection parameters of this SP system are 1500 mg/L polymer concentration, 0.3 injection PV and the injection timing of 96% water cut. The finding of this study can help for better understanding of the application of SP flooding in high water-cut oil field production.