Abstract

The injection of chemical solutions plays an important role in increasing the recovery factor of mature fields. Chemical flooding is considered as an attractive alternative to conventional waterflooding; it can improve the area swept efficiency not only in the macro scale but also in the micro scale by controlling the mobility of the displaced fluid.

Adsorption of polymer on reservoir rock is an extremely important parameter for chemical flooding. Adsorption represents a loss of a chemical agent from solution, and consequently, a net reduction in the surfactant-polymer slug. Therefore, the efficiency of polymer flooding will be significantly diminished not only in technical aspects but also in terms of economics. However, numerical simulation of multi-component adsorption is still limited and the adsorption process in a polymer/rock system has not yet been well developed, especially for highly heterogeneous reservoirs. In this paper, the adsorption process is modeled by the Langmuir isotherm theory. The simulation results indicate that polymer adsorption strongly depends on the polymer concentration, shear rate, pH, salt concentration, and reservoir heterogeneity. An effective controlling of such parameters can reduce the effect of polymer adsorption so that it helps minimize mass of chemical loss and improve economic efficiency of the chemical flooding process.