Chemical EOR – Enhanced Oil Recovery
Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) focuses on injecting recovered water, usually with a high brine content, into an oil reservoir to recover entrained oil reserves.
Often chemicals are injected to change the mobility of the displacing fluid. The injected chemicals typically consist of polymers that increase the viscosity of the displacing solution but may also include surfactants or alkalis. Surfactants lower interfacial tension, thus improving the wettability of porous rocks. Alkali chemicals react with certain types of oil to form surfactants.
ProProcess is an independent equipment supplier, offering world-class enhanced oil recovery equipment solutions. We offer both a standard range of polymer injection facilities, as well as customised solutions, depending on application.
Our modular EOR process plants give you the scalability and the flexibility that you need.
Polymer Make-Down Systems
ProProcess supplies state-of the-art, modular polymer injection and preparation systems to the international chemical EOR market. We developed a standard range of polymer injection solutions to target rapid field deployment and minimise equipment cost. This allows you to start your field injection projects in the shortest times. In our standard range we have optimised equipment layout within the modules to provide optimum operational and maintenance accessibility.
Our standard modular range consists of equipment that falls within the CORE of the facility and CLIENT CONFIGURABLE modules. These fully integrated plants are supplied including, but not limited to:
CORE
Our CORE modules have been pre-designed and field-proven and encompass:
Polymer metering & wetting apparatus options
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- Static – showerhead
- Dynamic – shear pump
Polymer hydration tanks
Mother solution transfer
Reagent/polymer dilution (HP/LP) and injection
Utilities, consisting of
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- Instrument air
- Nitrogen (95% to 99.99% purity)
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Central MCC & PLC
CLIENT CONFIGURABLE
Our Standard Range offers our clients a degree of configuration freedom suited for your unique field requirements. ProProcess has developed some cost optimised standard modules to select from, to assist you in producing oil rapidly.
Injection modules: the injection pumps used in our facilities are sourced from market leading vendors, ensuring the uptime of our facilities and minimising polymer degradation.
Standard powder off-loading station & transfer modules
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- Bulk bags
- Tankers
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Standard polymer storage modules
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- Vertical – 30, 70 & 100-ton
- Horizontal – 25-ton min, expandable
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Water treatment & filtration, low/high-pressure water supply pumps
Laboratory container (optional)
Online monitoring of Viscosity, Conductivity & Hydrocarbons
Water preparation module: Site water often contains traces of oil and solids, which adversely affect the polymer make-up facility. ProProcess supplies water preparation modules to address these concerns.
Full-scale produced water treatment solutions
Special attention is given to the selection of the mechanical equipment such as the transfer and injection pumps, agitators and inline mixers to ensure that the hydrated polymer is not sheared. Furthermore, the piping network is designed to ensure low shear.
Dynamic Wetting Head
Our standard polymer make-down units are fitted with our chemical EOR specific dynamic wetting head (DWH). Our wetting head has been extensively tested in our dedicated testing facility. It has also been successfully deployed in field applications. Here is has shown to be robust and has a proven operational uptime.
Test Facilities
We offer independent polymer testing in our dedicated testing bay at our Fabrication facilities. Our enhanced oil recovery test apparatus consists of:
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- Brine make-up and feeding station
- Both the ProProcess proprietary chemical EOR Dynamic Wetting Head (DWH), as well as our EOR Static Wetting Head (SWH)
- A full hydration compartment fitted with a low-shear, triple blade agitator
- Laboratory equipment to cater for Millipore Filtration Ratio Tests (MFRT) and temperature controlled viscosity measurements
- All data is logged
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Bespoke Designs for Chemical EOR Applications
The ProProcess Group of companies provides our clients with affordable high-end products, all under one roof. The company operates as a vertically integrated entity, consisting of ProProcess Engineering, Fabrication and Automation & Electrical.
ProProcess Engineering supplies Basic Engineering/FEED services to your bespoke projects. This is applied when the project scope is in developmental stages. We work closely with you to develop your processing facility, using our vast experience in the engineering of modular process plant design and construction. This is followed by detailed design and procurement. At ProProcess, these are often executed in parallel to ensure your project enjoys the fastest time to market.
ProProcess Fabrication builds and assembles your modular processing plant in our workshop in South Africa. Prior to leaving our Fabrication facilities your plant is subjected to complete water commissioning. This ensures that all machinery and instrumentation is operating as intended. Our polymer plants are designed to function as a fully automated unit with limited operator intervention.
Once your plant reaches site, we offer installation supervision. Our plants are designed to minimise the installation time required on site. Our modules are fully integrated, pre-wired and pre-commissioned before being shipped. Furthermore, we dispatch our commissioning and completions team to ensure that your plant start-up runs smoothly. We provide hand-on training to your operations teams during commissioning. Our latest plants are fitted with remote monitoring capabilities. Our aftersales team is always at your disposal to provide any spares required.
Configuration
Equipment can be skid-mounted under a shaded structure (for warmer climates) or containerised with full HVAC (for cold climates). This allows for ease of shipping and transportation internationally. High mother solution concentrations are targeted to minimise equipment footprint and are then diluted to a final injection concentration as specified by the end user. The final plant and dilution configuration is dependent on various factors including field injection pressure required, existing water injection equipment, etc. but can primarily be categorised into the following:
Low pressure suction dilution – This option is typically chosen for a greenfields operation, where high pressure water is not readily available on site.
High pressure discharge dilution –This option is typically chosen for a brownfields operation where existing high-pressure water supply pumps are utilised for the waterflood.
Injection Pressure Control (“Curlers”)
We offer individual pumps per injection as well as other pressure distribution devices like “curlers”. The polymer solution normally flows through the main header. If a pressure drop is to be subjected on the polymer solution, a specific length of the header will be closed, forcing the solution through higher resistance coiled pipe thus imposing a frictional pressure drop on the solution.
Contact Us
For more information about our services and how we can create a solution for your needs.