Salinity of injection water and its impact on oil recovery absolute permeability, residual oil saturation, interfacial tension and capillary pressure

Abstract

Laboratory tests and field applications show that low-salinity water flooding could lead to significant reduction of residual oil saturation. There has been a growing interest with an increasing number of low-salinity water flooding studies. However, there are few quantitative studies on flow and transport behavior of low-salinity IOR processes.This paper presents laboratory investigation of the effect of salinity injection water on oil recovery, pressure drop, permeability, IFT and relative permeability in water flooding process. The experiments were conducted at the 80°C and a net overburden pressure of 1700psi using core sample. The results of this study have been shown oil recovery increases as the injected water salinity up to 200,000ppm and appointment optimum salinity. This increase has been found to be supported by a decrease in the IFT. This effect caused a reduction in capillary pressure increasing the tendency to reduce the residual oil saturation.