Fakher Sherif, Khlaifat Abdelaziz, Mokhtar Karim, Abdelsamei Mariam
Department of Petroleum and Energy Engineering, School of Science and Engineering, The American University in Cairo, New Cairo 11835, Egypt.
Polymers (Basel). 2024 Dec 17;16(24):3503. doi: 10.3390/polym16243503.
One of the most challenging aspects of manipulating the flow of fluids in subsurfaces is to control their flow direction and flow behavior. This can be especially challenging for compressible fluids, such as CO, and for multiphase flow, including both water and carbon dioxide (CO). This research studies the ability of two crosslinked polymers, including hydrolyzed polyacrylamide and acrylic acid/hydrolyzed polyacrylamide crosslinked polymers, to reduce the permeability of both CO and formation water using different salinities and permeability values and in the presence of crude oil under different injection rates. The result showed that both polymers managed to reduce the permeability of water effectively; however, their CO permeability-reduction potential was much lower, with the CO permeability reduction being less than 50% of the water reduction potential in the majority of the experiments. This was mainly due to the high flow rate of the CO compared to the water, which resulted in significant shearing of the crosslinked polymer. The crosslinked polymers' swelling ratios were impacted differently based on the salinity, with the maximum swelling ratio being 9.8. The HPAM polymer was negatively affected by the presence of crude oil, whereas increasing salinity improved its performance greatly. All in all, both polymers had a higher permeability reduction for the formation water compared to CO under all conditions. This research can help improve the applicability of CO-enhanced oil recovery and CO storage in depleted oil reservoirs. The ability of the crosslinked polymers to improve CO storage will be a main focus of future research.
在地下控制流体流动最具挑战性的方面之一是控制其流动方向和流动行为。对于可压缩流体（如二氧化碳）以及包括水和二氧化碳的多相流而言，这可能尤其具有挑战性。本研究考察了两种交联聚合物，即水解聚丙烯酰胺和丙烯酸/水解聚丙烯酰胺交联聚合物，在不同盐度、渗透率值以及不同注入速率下存在原油的情况下，降低二氧化碳和地层水渗透率的能力。结果表明，两种聚合物都能有效降低水的渗透率；然而，它们降低二氧化碳渗透率的潜力要低得多，在大多数实验中，二氧化碳渗透率的降低幅度不到水降低潜力的50%。这主要是因为与水相比，二氧化碳的流速较高，导致交联聚合物发生显著剪切。交联聚合物的溶胀率受盐度的影响不同，最大溶胀率为9.8。水解聚丙烯酰胺聚合物受到原油存在的负面影响，而盐度增加则极大地改善了其性能。总体而言，在所有条件下，两种聚合物对地层水的渗透率降低幅度都高于对二氧化碳的渗透率降低幅度。这项研究有助于提高二氧化碳强化采油和在枯竭油藏中进行二氧化碳封存的适用性。交联聚合物提高二氧化碳封存的能力将是未来研究的主要重点。
