Abstract
The past decades have witnessed a rapid development of enhanced oil recovery techniques, among which the effect of salinity has become a very attractive topic due to its significant advantages on environmental protection and economical benefits. Numerous studies have been reported focusing on analysis of the mechanisms behind low salinity waterflooding in order to better design the injected salinity under various working conditions and reservoir properties. However, the effect of injection salinity on pipeline scaling has not been widely studied, but this mechanism is important to gathering, transportation and storage for petroleum industry. In this paper, an exhaustive literature review is conducted to summarize several well-recognized and widely accepted mechanisms, including fine migration, wettability alteration, double layer expansion, and multicomponent ion exchange. These mechanisms can be correlated with each other, and certain combined effects may be defined as other mechanisms. In order to mathematically model and numerically describe the fluid behaviors in injection pipelines considering injection salinity, an exploratory phase-field model is presented to simulate the multiphase flow in injection pipeline where scale formation may take place. The effect of injection salinity is represented by the scaling tendency to describe the possibility of scale formation when the scaling species are attached to the scaled structure. It can be easily referred from the simulation result that flow and scaling conditions are significantly affected if a salinity-dependent scaling tendency is considered. Thus, this mechanism should be taken into account in the design of injection process if a sustainable exploitation technique is applied by using purified production water as injection fluid. Finally, remarks and suggestions are provided based on our extensive review and preliminary investigation, to help inspire the future discussions.
Highlights
Waterflooding is a commonly used approach to enhance oil recovery at the secondary recovery stage, mainly due to its cheaper and easier availability in various engineering environments [1,2,3,4]
After the pioneering experiments in [10], the better performance of low salinity waterflooding has been recognized theoretically and this technique has become a preferred approach in Improved Oil Recovery (IOR) and Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]
Chemical understanding of low salinity waterflooding as an enhanced oil recovery technique often relies on the surface interactions and ion adsorptions, which are closely relevant to the temperature conditions
Summary
Waterflooding is a commonly used approach to enhance oil recovery at the secondary recovery stage, mainly due to its cheaper and easier availability in various engineering environments [1,2,3,4]. In order to figure out the dominant mechanisms that control the low salinity effect on oil recovery enhancement, numerous studies were conducted in both academia and industry, from laboratory core flooding tests [14] to field scale observations [21], from sandstone reservoirs [14] to carbonate reservoirs [22], from on-land oil fields [23] to. In order to mathematically describe the effect of salinity on pipeline scaling, numerical modeling is presented in Section 3 using phase-field model to describe the multi-phase fluid flow common seen in oil field, for the injection fluid mixture with purified produced water with certain species with scaling tendency.
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