Simplified Numerical Model for Simulation of Surfactant/Polymer (SP) Flooding Process for Enhanced Oil Recovery

Abstract

This paper presents a simple physical-based numerical model that simulates the surfactant-polymer (SP) flooding process for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). In this study, black-oil subsystems based on volume fraction balance was proposed for developing numerical model. The model was upgraded by taking into account different aspects of SP EOR process such as gravity effect, capillary pressure, mobility reduction factor, polymer/surfactant adsorption on rock and interfacial tension (IFT) reduction. The Langmuir isotherm coefficients for the adsorption of polymer and of surfactant were chosen from separately laboratory experiments of single component injection of surfactant and of polymer in the Bentheimer sandstone core. The systems of equations were solved in the Finite Elements based Method (FEM). The validity of the implementation was tested by comparing the results attained from simplified numerical model with laboratory core-flooding experimental data of SP flood into Bentheimer sandstone core. A comparison showed excellent agreement between the numerical results with the core flooding experimental results. This confirms that the developed numerical model in this work is robust and has capability to reproduce the main features of surfactant/polymer flooding (SP) EOR in the consolidated sandstone porous media.