What after ASP?

What happens to a pool after an ASP flood?

One operator believed that ASP flood economics aren't positive at lower oil prices. He cancelled his polymer injection and proposed another type of flood instead.

You can get his discussion of polymer injection from his regulatory application -- delivered to you within moments by clicking on the button below.

Polymer is expensive

Injecting polymer into a floods is much more expensive than just injecting water. Even if the polymer shuts off some water and encourages more oil production, the additional cost of injectant can seriously mar the flood economics.

Even polymer floods need pattern balancing

Perhaps even more interesting are the operator's previous applications where he reports pattern problems with the pool. You can find them all through AppIntel.

The pool contains 23 API oil and has some high permeability streaks. He should have taken advantage of the permeability vectors in his flood to improve sweep and recovery.

Polymer injection is not, in itself, a panacea for all problems. Without pattern balancing and a sound flood management system like Optiflood, polymer can accentuate problems in the rock rather than mitigate them. Seems that's what happened to this flood.

Get the real polymer story from applications

Polymer chemical manufacturers all claim superior results and fancy polymer architecture like those shown in the diagram above. But the best way to be sure about polymer results is to study others' field tests.

If you can find a field that is under polymer flood, you can study the success (or failure) for yourself. You can look at the production results. You can determine how much the reserves increased. You can decide how much the water cut dropped.

Find it quick with AppIntel

It's impossible to find polymer and ASP flood information in applications without AppIntel. With AppIntel's natural language search, you can type in a search string like polymer surfactant and find all the applicable applications.

Applications have a much more trustworthy story about the success and failure of ASP than any other source. Better than sales literature. Better than technical papers.

Every application is ground-truthed to an actual well location in UTM or Lat/Long. You can follow up your reading of an ASP application with an actual look back at the production history before, during and after the ASP injection.

Better than technical papers

Applications are a much better source of information than technical papers for two reasons. First, applications are adjudicated by a picky regulator rather than a peer reviewer. The regulator is interested in increasing reserves, not in exploring science.

Second, applications explore both the benefits and also the problems and difficulty with ASP. Technical papers usually only focus on one dimension of field or lab results.

Tags: Polymer, Flood, Heavy Oil

Granger Low   2 Jan 2017

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