Flow of Hydrophobically Modified Water-Soluble-Polymer Solutions in Porous Media: New Experimental Insights in the Diluted Regime

The specific molecular structure of hydrophobically modified water-soluble polymers (HMWSPs), also called hydrophobically associative polymers, gives them interesting thickening and surface-adsorption abilities compared with classical water-soluble polymers (WSPs), which could be useful in polymer-flooding and well-treatment operations. However, their strong adsorption obviously can impair their injectivity, and, conversely, the shear sensitivity of their gels can be detrimental to well treatments. Determining for which improved-oil-recovery (IOR) application HMWSPs are best suited, therefore, remains difficult. The aim of this work is to bring new insight regarding the interaction mechanisms between HMWSPs and rock matrix and the consequences concerning their propagation in reservoirs. A consistent set of HMWSPs with sulfonated polyacrylamide backbones and alkyl hydrophobic side chains together with an equivalent WSP was synthesized and fully characterized. HMWSP and WSP solutions were then injected in model granular packs. As expected, with HMWSPs, high resistance factors (or mobility reductions, R-m) were observed. Yet, within the limit of the injected volumes, the effluent showed the same viscosity and polymer concentration as the injected solutions. A first significant outcome concerns the specificities of the R-m curves during HMWSP injections. R-m increases took place in two steps. The first corresponded to the propagation of the viscous front, as observed with WSP, whereas the second was markedly delayed, occurring several pore volumes (PV) after the breakthrough. This result is not compatible with the classical picture of multilayer adsorption of HMWSPs but suggests that injectivity is controlled solely by the adsorption of minor polymeric species. This hypothesis was confirmed by reinjecting the collected effluents into fresh cores; no second-step R-m increases were observed. Brine injections in HMWSP-treated cores revealed high residual resistance factors (or irreversible permeability reductions, R-k), which can be attributed to the presence of thick polymer-adsorbed layers on the pore surface. Nevertheless, R-k values strongly decreased when increasing the brine-flow rate. This second significant outcome shows that the adsorbed-layer thickness is shear-controlled. These new results should lead to proposing new adapted filtration and injection procedures for HMWSPs, aimed, in particular, at improving their injectivity.