Abstract
Low-salinity water flooding (LSWF) is one of techniques that can be used to improve oil production and has gained a significant attention in these days because of its advantages over conventional water flooding and chemical flooding. Even though many mechanisms have been recommended on an extra oil recovery achieved using LSWF process, the principle fundamental of the mechanism is still not fully understood. This research paper investigates the potential of oil recovery in an onshore sandstone reservoir using LSWF. A field-scale three–dimensional reservoir model has been developed via CMG’s GEM compositional simulator where the model validated against a real production field data that were in good agreement with a deviation value of 8%. The primary mechanism of LSWF has been identified by providing incremental oil recovery due to a multi-component ion exchange mechanism that causes wettability alteration of reservoir rock from oil-wet to water-wet. The sensitivity study showed that LSWF provides a higher accumulative oil production compared to conventional high salinity water injection with 13.5 and 12 MMSTB. Moreover, the early time of low saline brine injection can provide a maximum oil recovery up to 71%. Therefore, implementing this scenario immediately after the primary recovery, it provides production benefits in both secondary and tertiary method. The oil recover factor increased to 75.5% with the increasing of brine injection rate up to an optimum value of 5320 bbl/d. A reservoir temperature also influenced the ion exchange wettability alteration during LSWF in which as the temperature increasing enhances the oil recovery. Therefore, a high temperature sandstone reservoir will be a potential candidate for LSWF.
Highlights
Conventional waterflooding is a secondary oil recovery method that involves the injection of water to improve the production and it typically follows primary recovery
This study investigates the effects of reservoir temperature on wettability alteration that occurs in which the oil recovery obtained via Low-salinity water flooding (LSWF) may increase with increase in temperature
The application of LSWF in tertiary mode after secondary conventional high-salinity waterflooding (HSWF) yielded an additional oil recovery of 5.8%. This implies that LSWF even has an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) potential
Summary
Conventional waterflooding is a secondary oil recovery method that involves the injection of water to improve the production and it typically follows primary recovery. Extensive coreflood tests were published, addressing the benefits of low-salinity effect in the process of oil recovery via waterflooding. Most of these experiment results showed that when the injection water has lower salinity compared to the formation water salinity, a higher oil recovery is obtained for both secondary and tertiary recovery modes. Several publications have reported that the injection of low-salinity brine increases the oil recovery by a factor up to 40 % compared with
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