Polymer Applications for Enhanced Oil Recovery: Challenges and Opportunities

Dear Colleagues,

Polymer flooding is one of the promising and well-established chemical enhanced oil recovery (CEOR) methods to improve oil sweep efficiency. This can be achieved through both mobility and conformance controls. Recent studies showed that polymers are even capable of improving microscopic displacement efficiency as well. Polymer applications have been mainly focused on sandstone reservoirs with mild conditions of reservoir heterogeneity, salinity, and temperature. 

Polymer flooding in carbonate reservoirs is very limited due to the related harsh conditions of high heterogeneity, low permeability, as well as high temperature and high salinity (HTHS). Conventional polymers fail under these conditions due to precipitation, viscosity loss, and polymer adsorption. However, researchers have been investigating the possibility of expanding the envelope of polymer flooding to carbonate reservoirs.

Therefore, to overcome these challenges, several novel polymers have been introduced to withstand the harsh reservoir conditions in carbonates including, but not limited to, ATBS, AMPS, NVP-based polymers, and hydrophobic associative polymers, along with bio-polymers, e.g., Scleroglucan. These polymers have shown low shear sensitivity, low adsorption, and robust thermal/salinity tolerance. Moreover, low-salinity water can precondition high-salinity reservoirs before polymer flooding to decrease polymer adsorption and viscosity loss.

In this Special Issue, we aim to collect reasonable and comprehensive findings regarding polymer enhanced oil recovery applications for both mobility control, as well as conformance control. The targeted applications are focused in sandstones and carbonates from experimental, numerical, and field works. The content of this collection will cover diverse fields of synthetic polymers vs. biopolymers, associative polymers, polymers under harsh reservoir conditions, polymer gels, polymer viscoelastic effects, novel polymers, low-salinity polymer, hybrid techniques, and others.

Dr. Emad W. Al Shalabi
Guest Editor

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