Paper: CONFORMANCE-IMPROVEMENT-TREATMENT DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGIES TO MAXIMIZE PERFORMANCE -- BASED ON 20 YEARS EXPERIENCE WITH A SINGLE POLYMER-GEL TECHNOLOGY

Design and implementation strategies for maximizing the economic rate of return for conformance-improvement polymer-gel treatments will be reviewed. These design and implementation strategies are based on 20 years of field experience and based on number of large field projects involving a single polymer-gel technology. The presentation will be limited to discussing gel treatments that are applied to reservoirs suffering from fracture and/or other high-permeability (>2 Darcy) reservoir flow anomalies. Strategies both for injection-well sweep-improvement gel treatments (primarily intended to generate incremental oil production) and for production-well water-shutoff gel treatments (primarily intended to reduce OPEX) will be discussed. Special attention will be paid to the volume sizing of such gel treatments. In addition, the often overlooked economically promising use of polymer-gel conformance-improvement treatments during CO2 oil-recovery flooding operations will be touched upon.