Formulation of Bio-Waste Derived Polymer and Its Application in Enhanced Oil Recovery

Abstract

Polymers are substances considered to have their molecular structure being built up majorly from a large amount of similar smaller units bonded together, for instance synthetic organic materials used as plastics and resins. It has been stated that due to reservoir heterogeneity and capillary forces affecting the water flood process causing low oil recovery after a particular interim, the technique of implementing polymer flooding as a chemical flooding mechanism has been introduced and is rapidly gaining attention in the oil and gas industry. The study describes primarily the formulation of a specific bio-polymer product and examining its performance in Enhanced oil recovery. The musa paradisiaca derived bio-polymer solution was formulated and injected at different concentrations by performing simultaneous experiments at certain operating conditions using a reservoir permeability testing equipment (RPT). Core sample flooding experiment was performed on three core samples of varying porosity and permeability. The bio-polymer is flooded through core sample at different pore volumes using the RPT as the flooding equipment. The bio-polymer solution has the ability to lower mobility by reducing the relative permeability to water as well as increasing its viscosity (an index of mobility ratio improvement), which reduces the mobility of the driving phase, hence causing an increased mobility of the driven phase(oil). From the experimental procedure performed in this study, the results indicate that the injection of newly derived bio-polymer solution into oil strata enhanced oil recovery where the incremental oil recovery attained for each core sample were 16.71%, 25.58% and 14.55% of the respective original oil in place (OOIP), indicating an average incremental oil recovery of about 18.94% for entire experiment performed. The results obtained from the flooding of newly derived bio-polymer solution proved a better performance in oil recovery percentage when compared with flooding of gum arabic polymer solution.