New Insights into the Critical Role of Geology in Modeling and Prediction of Low Salinity Waterflooding

Abstract

Summary Although the advantages of Low Salinity Waterflooding (LSW) have been widely reported, studies of LSW in the past two decades have mainly focused on the underlying mechanisms through core flooding experiments. For more successful and broader applications of LSW in the field scale, it is required to have a comprehensive understanding of the LSW performance with complex geological features on a large scale that has never been addressed in the past. This paper presents insights on field scale modeling and prediction of LSW to address the current challenges with: (1) an equation-of-state compositional simulator fully coupled to multiple ion exchanges, geochemical reactions, and wettability alteration; (2) incorporation of critical geological properties important in LSW; (3) effective closed-loop reservoir management for design and prediction of the LSW process; (4) LSW evaluation in a full field scale. A mechanistic LSW model and a closed-loop modeling approach are introduced in this paper that can efficiently capture the critical effects of geology on the LSW process by integrating the use of geological software, a reservoir simulator and a robust optimizer. First, eighty geostatiscal realizations with different facies and lithology properties and distributions are generated to evaluate the effect of reservoir geology, in particular the critical effects of clay, on LSW. A wide range of recovery factors from 19% to 40% indicate that the effectiveness of LSW strongly depends on geological factors such as facies properties, clay distribution and clay proportion. In consistency with the laboratory and field-scale observations, wettability alteration has been identified as the dominant effect that contributes approximately 58% to 73% to the incremental oil recovery from these realizations. Detailed analyses of the key factors were addressed to allow the design of optimal injection strategies to maximize the oil recovery by LSW. LSW is then evaluated in a closed-loop reservoir management for a sandstone reservoir in both secondary and tertiary modes. It is found that secondary and tertiary LSW give about 6% and 4.1% incremental OOIP over high salinity waterflooding, respectively. The simulation results also indicate that the sooner the LSW process is started, the better the benefit is.