Polymers in Enhanced oil Recovery — Solution Structure and Viscosity of Water-Soluble Vinylpolymers

Abstract

The development of chemical systems for enhanced oil recovery is essentially an economical problem, where the total costs of chemicals, their formulation and field application has to be balanced against the price of oil to be recovered. As in many other cases the polymers applied in the very early attempts are performing quite satisfactorily and are difficult to replace by later developments. Many industrial and academic research activities^1,2 however are an indication that there is still a need to develop improved polymers where the following parameters have to be considered: solubility in water and salt brine, viscosity, elasticity, adsorptivity, filterability, shear stability, temperature stability, compatibility to other chemicals as surfactants. The search for new polymers has to follow rational lines of chemical and physical nature to develop an understanding of the relation between composition, solution structure and efficiency of a given polymer. In this contribution viscosity as one of the basic physical parameters has been selected to allow for a first evaluation of performance in EOR application.