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This study aims to compare the effectiveness of two polymer mobility design methods, namely Endpoint and James Sheng methods, for optimizing the viscosity target in polymer injection enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Coreflood tests were conducted to evaluate the impact of the mobility design method on injected polymer viscosity and oil recovery. The results showed that the choice of mobility design method significantly affected the injected polymer viscosity and ultimate oil recovery. A higher polymer viscosity was found to increase sweep efficiency, resulting in better oil recovery, but also led to injectivity issues. Thus, careful consideration is required when selecting a polymer mobility design method to achieve optimum oil recovery while minimizing injectivity issues. These findings have significant implications for optimizing the polymer injection process for EOR applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waterflooding is the most commonly used secondary oil recovery method due to the general availability of water and is considered as a simple inexpensive method. However, viscous fingering is a common problem that occurs in the waterflooding process as a result of either an unfavorable mobility ratio in the flood or heterogeneity was largely identified. Polymer injection is a method of Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) to obtain higher oil recovery by increasing the viscosity of water as displacing fluid which resulting in better flood front stability because of favorable mobility ratio is achieved and the effect of heterogeneity can be remedied by the application of polymer injection. Therefore, polymers are used to overcome the viscous fingering problem that occurs in the waterflooding process. However, the implementation of polymer injection on a field scale needs preliminary laboratory analysis to evaluate polymer injection's efficiency and flow behavior of polymer injection in a porous medium. Micromodel will be used in this experimental study to clearly visualize the flow behavior of polymer injection in a porous medium. In this research work, a series of waterflooding and polymer injection processes were conducted in homogeneous and heterogeneous micromodel at varying conditions of polymer concentration and layer inclination angle to evaluate the effect of reservoir heterogeneity and polymer concentration on oil recovery factor. All images as the result of micromodel flooding test were further analyzed by using Digital Image Analysis (DIA) to know the fluid saturation in a micromodel so that the oil recovery factor can be determined. The experimental results showed that the increase in polymer concentration would result in a more favorable mobility ratio. Therefore, higher incremental oil recovery will be obtained. For the effect of reservoir heterogeneity, the highest incremental oil recovery factor is achieved in pattern C (the layers are perpendicular to the mean flow direction) when the polymer solution is injected from a low permeable zone. This study shows the implementation of micromodel to understand enhanced oil recovery technique in a quarter five-spot system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]