Formation damage during chemical flooding

Nowadays, the application of chemicals as enhanced oil recovery (EOR) agents to improve recovery from hydrocarbon reservoirs is gaining increasingly more attention. Meanwhile, it is crucial to have sufficient knowledge about possible reservoir damages and associated economical risks caused by such approaches. Thus, this chapter represents an integration of state-of-the-art experimental, modeling, and field utilization of chemical enhanced oil recovery (CEOR) methods to establish more awareness about the chemically, mechanically, and biologically induced damages during CEOR plans. Improving the efficiency of an applied EOR technique requires an integrated understanding of the possible future damages from multidisciplinary perspectives. With this in view, in this chapter, potential damages arising from applying each CEOR method are introduced, and practical solutions to control, remediate, and even prevent such damages are proposed. Furthermore, a comprehensive and integrated procedure to evaluate risks and opportunities associated with formation damages during CEOR projects is proposed. This workflow blends the quantitative, semiqualitative, and qualitative techniques considering all the technical, regulatory, and financial aspects of a project to provide an accurate and rigorous estimation of the potential risks.