Best Practices for Accelerated Screening and Deployment of Polymer Flooding: Engineering Workflows and Field Learnings

Global oil production increasingly comes from mature fields where recovery factors remain stubbornly low (typically around 35% of the original oil in place) despite decades of technological progress in petrophysics, reservoir simulation, and seismic imaging (OGA 2018; NPD 2019). At the same time, water production continues to grow: for many assets, 3–7 barrels of water must be handled, treated, and reinjected for every barrel of oil produced. This combination of low ultimate recovery and high water handling erodes project value, stresses surface facilities, and increases energy use and CO₂ emissions. When not addressed early, both recovery opportunities and economic windows for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) are progressively lost.

Polymer flooding is a well-established water-based EOR method for improving macroscopic sweep efficiency by increasing injected water viscosity and reducing the water–oil mobility ratio. Numerous field applications have demonstrated its ability to delay water breakthrough, recover additional oil, and reduce water–oil ratio (WOR). However, even in reservoirs that are technically well suited for polymer injection, projects are frequently delayed or abandoned. Long decision cycles, fragmented workflows, and slow transitions between concept, laboratory work, design, and field deployment often limit the impact of polymer flooding more than chemistry or physics do.

To fully capture the benefits of polymer flooding, engineers need workflows that are both technically robust and fast to execute. The key challenge is not to reinvent polymer flooding, but to remove unnecessary delays in screening, data acquisition, laboratory evaluation, design, and piloting while still honoring basic reservoir-engineering principles and field constraints. This requires a clear sequence of decisions, early identification of key uncertainties, and a practical methodology that links polymer chemistry, surface facilities, reservoir behavior, and project economics.

The objective of this paper is to summarize best practices and propose an accelerated, field-centric workflow for polymer flooding, from reservoir screening and candidate selection through laboratory design, simulation, pilot implementation, and early decision gates for full-field deployment. The emphasis is on moderate-to-high permeability conventional reservoirs with active or planned waterflooding, where displacement efficiency is limited by heterogeneity and an adverse water–oil mobility ratio. The workflow is not intended to be universal or to cover all reservoir types (e.g., tight formations, heavily fractured systems, or carbonates at ultra-high temperature), but to provide a pragmatic, experience-based framework for rapidly moving technically suitable projects from the idea stage to polymer injection in the field.