Low Salinity Waterflooding: From Single Well Chemical Tracer Test Interpretation to Sector Model Forecast Scenarios

Abstract

Abstract We study Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) through Low Salinity (LS) waterflooding in a brown oil field. LS waterflooding is an emerging EOR technique in which water with reduced salinity is injected into a reservoir to improve oil recovery, as compared with conventional waterflooding, in which High Salinity (HS) brine or seawater are commonly used. The efficiency of this technique can be quantified at the well-scale by a Single Well Chemical Tracer Test (SWCTT), which is an in-situ method for measuring the Remaining Oil Saturation (ROS) after flooding the near-wellbore region with a displacing agent. Two SWCTTs were executed on a sandstone North African field. The tests were realized in sequence with seawater and LS water to evaluate the EOR potential at the well-scale. Here, we propose the interpretation of these two SWCTTs. They were modeled through numerical simulations because of the presence of several non-idealities in the complex scenario considered. A recently-developed tracer simulator was employed to solve the reactive transport problem. This was used as a fast post-processing tool coupled with a conventional reservoir simulator. Model parameters were estimated within an inverse modeling framework, on the basis of an assisted history matching procedure that exploits the Metropolis Hastings Algorithm (MHA). Results were scaled up on a sector model of the field, and forecast scenarios that consider a field-scale implementation of this technique were defined. The well-scale displacement efficiency gain associated with LS water, as compared with seawater, was evaluated. It was quantified as a ROS reduction of 8 saturation unit (s.u.), with a P10–P90 range of 3–15 s.u. Reservoir-scale simulations suggest that the associated ultimate oil recovery of the EOR pilot may be increased by 2% with LS water, with a P10–P90 range of 0.7–4.3%. Overall, the LS EOR potential for a selected field was quantified through a robust and original workflow, based on SWCTT interpretation. This state-of-the-art procedure is now available for further applications. The simulated oil recovery improvement with LS water is promising, and leads the way to the implementation of an inter-well field trial.