Evaluation of Flow Diverter Chemical to Improve Waterflood Performance as Conformance Control for Heterogeneous Reservoir and High-Temperature Field Application: An Innovative Experimental Design

Abstract Water injection fields account for over half of Malaysia’s oil production, with most of these fields at matured waterflooding stage. Low sweep efficiency due to water conformance where reservoir with high heterogeneity might cause premature breakthrough is one of the issues that leads to low oil recovery. In this study, we described the comprehensive experimental analysis to substantiate waterflooding performance in heterogeneous reservoirs by evaluating the flow diversion chemical (FDC) as a water conformance agent at high temperature. Chemical characterization, rheology, particle size analysis, compatibility, and thermal stability were evaluated for FDC according to the prevailing mechanism. Afterward, an experiment to simulate the reservoir environment was conducted to estimate oil incremental and blocking mechanism, in terms of residual resistance factor (RRF) performance in the intended field condition. The test was innovatively set up using commercial outcrop and reservoir native cores in dual-core permeability systems to test high permeability and low permeability porous media at high temperature up to 115°C temperature to mimic the conformance process. Typical single core flooding test are only able to determine the potential of the blockage mechanism by determining the RRF, without the diversion effect to quantify the additional oil recovery from the flow diversion process. The setup uses cylindrical preserved core plug samples with permeability contrast ranges from 100mD to 2 Darcy and tested at 115°C. The customized coreflood design successfully mimicked the conformance process. In our study, the RRF of 186 and cumulative oil recovery of 52% with an incremental oil recovery of >5% was obtained by the FDC injection. The study provides an innovative way in the coreflooding experiment to evaluate the performance of a conformance control agent in a heterogeneous reservoir with high temperatures.