Exploring the Upper Limit of Oil Viscosity for Polymer Flood in Heavy Oil

Abstract Large scale polymer flooding projects in heavy oil are now ongoing in several countries and numerous other projects are at the pilot or design stages. However, there is currently no guideline for the maximum acceptable oil viscosity, one of the important parameters in the screening of new projects. Standard screening criteria do not take the latest field results into account and more recent guidelines rely mostly on viscosity averages whereas they should focus on the extreme values instead. Since the laboratory can only provide little help to settle this issue we propose to examine current field projects for guidance. To the best of the author's knowledge, the Pelican Lake and the Seal polymer floods, both in Canada, are operating in the highest oil viscosity ranges; moreover, the data is public and can easily be accessed. We have therefore examined the performances of polymer injection in the highest ranges of oil viscosity in both fields to get an understanding of the limits. This involved first the identification of the highest oil viscosity patterns, then the estimation of the live oil viscosity during the polymer flood in these patterns and finally the performances of the polymer flood. Viscosity measurements are notoriously difficult and not always very reliable in heavy oil and the evaluation of in-situ viscosity is even more difficult; therefore, we used ranges of viscosity rather than definite values. The observations from Pelican Lake and Seal seem in good agreement and suggest that polymer flood is still feasible and can provide an acceleration in production for live oil viscosities up to 10,000-12,000 cp. There is little experience beyond these values, but it appears that for higher ranges of viscosity polymer injection becomes much more difficult; in Seal polymer flood does not appear to be working satisfactorily in oil viscosities above 14,000 cp. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first time that the issue of maximum oil viscosity is investigated in such a manner. Although these results are preliminary and would require further confirmation from other field cases, this paper will provide guidance to engineers screening heavy oil reservoirs for potential application of polymer flood.