The average global recovery factor of a typical oil and gas field is approximately 40% at after secondary recovery processes such as gas lifting and water flooding. The low recovery factor is often a result of by passing a considerable amount of oil in the reservoir due to unknown reservoir heterogeneity and incomplete understanding of the geology. Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods will play a key role in increasing recovery factors from existing reservoirs. Heterogeneous reservoir sands often show permeability contrast between layers and therefore lead to early water breakthrough when water flooding. In such situations, polymer flooding can potentially be a suitable EOR technique that helps to lower water cut and increase recovery. The addition of polymers to the injected water lowers the mobility ratio, thereby reducing viscous fingering and delaying water breakthrough. This study investigates how a polymer flood design can be optimized while considering geological uncertainty in the reservoir models as well as modelling decisions. We applied an adjoint based technique to match data from a prolonged waterflood in the Watt Field, a synthetic but realistic clastic reservoir that is based on real data and captures a wide range of geological heterogeneities and uncertainties through a range of different model scenarios and model realizations. We apply Latin hypercube experimental designs with the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm in CMOST. This was used to build a proxy model employing polynomial regression for the optimization of the engineering parameters to maximize NPV. The optimization were performed for both history-matched models (constrained optimization) and the original, non-history-matched models (unconstrained optimization). The aim of this work is to analyse how geological uncertainties inherent to a heterogeneous clastic reservoir as well as modelling decisions impact the design and performance a polymer flood. We further investigate how the different optimization methods impact the predicted reservoir performance and optimal design of the polymer flood. Our findings show that both, geological and engineering uncertainties, impact polymer flooding and that designing the right well controls is essential for successful polymer flooding. Shale cut-offs are identified as a key petrophysical uncertainty when optimizing a polymer flood in a heterogeneous clastic reservoir. Furthermore, forecasts using constrained optimization yielded a much narrower range of incremental oil recovery and NPV during polymer flooding and may underestimate both, risk and opportunities for polymer flooding because the history matching of the water flood emphasizes different geological features compared to the way geology interacts with a more viscous polymer solution.

When simulating foam floods, uncertainties exist in both the foam and reservoir parameters however the combination of these uncertainties are rarely incorporated in forecasting. Foam flooding is an effective enhanced oil recovery method that controls mobility, reduces gas relative permeability, delays gas breakthrough and helps improve sweep efficiency. Thus it is often used in highly heterogeneous reservoirs where significant subsurface uncertainties exist. Foam uncertainties exist as (a) foam stability is controlled by a number of factors such as critical water and surfactant concentrations, brine salinity, and oil saturation which are unknown in the subsurface spatially and (b) foam flood simulation requires the accurate description of multiple parameters used in the foam flood models which are unknown. This study quantifies and compares the impact of uncertainties associated with foam model parameters with the heterogeneity of a fractured carbonate reservoir, an analogue to the highly prolific Arab D formation. Foam model parameters are not known a-priori but can be tuned to experimental data, which ideally represent a range of foam regimes and reservoir conditions. Geological heterogeneities in fractured carbonate reservoirs are complex and include, matrix wettability, fracture density/orientation and initial saturation distribution. To quantify uncertainties geological uncertainties in fractured carbonate reservoirs, an automated framework was used to history match the production response of a fractured carbonate field by varying geological parameters. This accounts for the geological uncertainties during a waterflood, which are then combined with foam uncertainties from experimental analysis in the optimisation step, by optimising the mean response of the model to foam flooding across a range of geological and foam scenarios. Our workflow used a combination of Particle Swarm Optimisation for history matching and manual optimisation, the final results of which show a wide range of possible impacts of foam flooding from different but equally well matched reservoirs. The novelty of our work is that it demonstrates how parameters that control foam stability and hence effectiveness in mobility control are related to both foam properties and geological uncertainty. Carrying these uncertainties into foam model properties from core to field scale will translate into considerably more robust estimates of uncertainty when predicting field-scale recovery compared to simulations that only consider uncertainty in the reservoir model.

Foam can be used to enhance oil recovery by increasing the areal and lateral sweep, reducing gravity override and diverting the flow from to low permeable areas. In this study we matched two experimental data sets of foam injection in carbonate rocks that were conducted at different pressure and temperature to a numerical model. The aim to analyse how the resulting changes in foam properties affect the overall sweep efficiency in the presence of geological uncertainties that are typical for a fractured carbonate reservoir. In order to quantify how reservoir heterogeneity impacts foam injection at high/low temperature and pressure, and hence the field-scale recovery, we deploy the matched foam models in a reservoir simulation model that is a realistic analogue for the Arab D formation in Qatar. We use this simulation model to test the effect of foam properties, injection strategies, and reservoir properties to analyse the displacement processes and compare the overall sweep and recovery. To this end, foam yields significantly higher recovery factors compared to other EOR methods, in particular if the reservoir is heavily fractured, but the uncertainties in foam properties can affect recovery factors to the same degree as geological uncertainties.