CO2 Flood

APPLICATIONS » A significant problem in most mature waterflood operations is poor oil recovery of the Original Oil In Place (OOIP), even after decades of water injection. Some locations (most commonly in West Texas and Rocky Mountains areas) inject carbon dioxide (CO2) as an EOR agent.  Usually targets for this technology are lighter oils that are susceptible to forming a miscible single phase when exposed to high pressure CO2.   This effect provides an efficient recovery of the remaining crude oil in place wherever there is good contact with the injected CO2.  

The CO2, however, has a challenge that it has inherently poor sweep behavior (poor conformance control).  The low viscosity CO2 tends to finger through the reservoir due to the geologic variations (e.g. “high perm streaks”) typical of real reservoirs. One technique to reduce this channeling for the CO2 is to alternate the CO2 with injection of water (WAG process – water alternating gas).  The water slugs tend to reduce the rate of penetration of CO2 into these high permeability areas.

• Cerogel PPG » Preformed Particle Gel for CO2 WAG process conformance control