Operator condemns polymer flood

Polymer floods are great at improving flood sweep and resource recovery. But one operator has condemned his polymer pilot.

How would you find field trials of polymer floods without AppIntel? You can use AppIntel to find all the polymer and ASP floods by typing into the KiP search box polymer or ASP.

Even though it decreased water cut in this pool, the operator shut down their nano-sphere pilot due to economics. But not for the reason you're imagining.

Check out slide 4 in the submission for an interesting technical description of nano-sphere flooding. Help yourself to his application documents through our secure checkout.

Tried everything

The operators of this pool have tried many different enhanced recovery methods.

Water. Solvent, Polymer. All have been tried in the pool. You can see results of each attempt.

Reviewing field trials of pools recovery attempts like these can help you learn much more about practical resource recovery.

Check out the results

You can review the results of his pilot by reading the application he submitted to the regulator. He included the actual UWIs of the injection wells in his application. You can check out his production results in Accumap.

Chemical sales persons may help you understand polymer injection. But if you really want an unbiased view, you must read the polymer application documents and conduct your own look-back.

Nanospheres

Operators sometimes use nanospheres to divert water in a flood.

They hope that this diverter will block thief zones where water is sweeping through the reservoir from injector to producer.

But these attempts have met with varying success. The most profitable floods are only partially due to specialized injectant and much more to do with regular flood maintenance. Even floods with exotic injectants can perform very poorly.

Find all the polymer scheme applications through AppIntel

Alberta companies have used polymer injection with varying degrees of success over the last 10 years. If you are thinking about trying a polymer or ASP flood, you must read their applications. These disclose all their scheme design plans and talk about their successes and failures.

You can find them through AppIntel. AppIntel is like a google search through application documents.

Tags: Polymer, Flood, Cut costs

Granger Low   Updated 3 Oct 2025

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