Mathematical Model for Water Flooding and HPAM Polymer  Flooding in Enhanced Oil Recovery

Ahmad Tawfiequrrahman Yuliansyah; Bardi Murachman; Suryo Purwono

Ahmad Tawfiequrrahman Yuliansyah Department of Chemical Engineering, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Jln. Grafika No.2 Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Bardi Murachman Department of Chemical Engineering, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Jln. Grafika No.2 Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Suryo Purwono Department of Chemical Engineering, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Jln. Grafika No.2 Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Keywords: enhanched oil recovery, HPAM, Mathematical Model, polymer flooding, water flooding

Abstract

The need for energy, especially the petroleum-based one, is steadily increasing along with population growth and technological advancement. Meanwhile, oil exploitation from oil reservoirs using primary and secondary techniques can only obtain about 30%-50 % out of the original oil in place. Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) is a method for increasing oil recovery from a reservoir by injecting materials that are not found in the reservoir, such as surfactant, polymer, etc. This research aims to develop a mathematical model representing two-phase flow through porous media in the EOR process. This model was extended from mass balance and fluid flow in porous media equations. The reliability of the model was then validated by water flooding and polymer flooding experiment. A porous media, constituted by a silica sand pack, was saturated with 2 % brine and sequentially flooded with HPAM polymer solution at various concentrations (5,000-15,000 ppm). The volume of the oil coming out from the media at any time intervals was measured. Validation of the model was carried out by optimizing the model parameters to obtain the best curve-fitting on the plot of the percentage of cumulative recovered oil against time. The results showed that the proposed mathematical model was reliable enough to express both water and polymer-flooding processes.

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