Agradecimentos: The authors would like to thank PETROBRAS, STATOIL, FCMG, ANP, UNISIM, DE-FEM, and CEPETRO for supporting this work, and CMG for software licenses

Polymer flooding is an effective means to recover oil although the method creates conditions absent in traditional water flooding, mainly due to the physical phenomena related to this technique, such as adsorption of polymer molecules and non-Newtonian behavior. This work aims to guide the...

Polymer flooding is an effective means to recover oil although the method creates conditions absent in traditional water flooding, mainly due to the physical phenomena related to this technique, such as adsorption of polymer molecules and non-Newtonian behavior. This work aims to guide the selection, through a decision analysis methodology, of the best strategy option using comparisons between water and polymer flooding projects in a heavy oil field development, under uncertainty, through a risk-return analysis. The methodology is based on a complete risk evaluation and decision analysis process presented by Schiozer et al. (2015), including the generation of uncertain scenarios, selection of representative models (RM), production strategy optimization for the RM, combination of the strategies in all scenarios, risk-return and risk curves analysis and the selection of the best strategy. The case study is representative of a heavy oil and high heterogeneous reservoir. We combined geological, economic and polymer uncertainties. We use Expected Monetary Value (EMV) as the objective function to measure economic return and Net Present Value (NPV) semi-deviation to measure risk. The results show that simplified comparisons between these two recovery methods, by only changing the injection fluid may lead to ill-informed decisions, and therefore, pre-planning is needed to realize the advantages from additional polymer costs to choose an optimal strategy. Furthermore, the results suggest that polymer flooding may be a viable alternative in the heavy oil field studied in this work

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