Modeling Low Salinity Waterflooding: Ion Exchange, Geochemistry and Wettability Alteration

Low salinity waterflood (LSW) has become an attractive enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method as it shows more advantages than conventional chemical EOR methods in terms of chemical costs, environmental impact, and field process implementation. Extensive laboratory studies in the past two decades have proposed several porescale mechanisms of oil displacement during LSW flooding, which are still open for discussion. However, the capability of reservoir simulators to model accurately this process is very limited. This paper provides a critical review of the state of the art in research and field applications of LSW. The focus is on a widely agreed mechanism that is the wettability alteration from preferential oil wetness to water wetness of formation rock surfaces. Ion exchange and geochemical reactions have been experimentally found to be important in oil mobilization due to enhanced water spreading at low salinity. To evaluate the significance of this surface wetting mechanism, a comprehensive ion exchange model with geochemical processes has been developed and coupled to the multi-phase multi-component flow equations in an equation-of-state compositional simulator. This new model captures most of the important physical and chemical phenomena that occur in LSW, including intra-aqueous reactions, mineral dissolution/precipitation, ion exchange and wettability alteration. The proposed LSW model is tested using the low-salinity core-flood experiments reported by Fjelde et al. (2012) for a North Sea reservoir and the low-salinity and high-salinity heterogeneous core-flood experiments by Rivet (2009) for a Texas reservoir. Excellent agreements between the model and the experiments in terms of effluent ion concentrations, effluent pH, and oil recovery were achieved. In addition, the model was also proved to be highly comparable with the ion-exchange model of the geochemistry software PHREEQC for both low salinity and high salinity (Appelo, 1994). Important observations in laboratory and field tests such as local pH increase, decrease in divalent effluent concentration, mineralogy contributions, and the influence of connate water and injected brine compositions can be reproduced with the proposed LSW model. Built in a robust reservoir simulator, it serves as a powerful tool for LSW design and the interpretation of process performance in field tests. Introduction Low salinity waterflooding (LSW) is an emerging EOR technique in which the salinity of the injected water is controlled to improve oil displacement efficiency without a significant loss of infectivity due to clay swelling. In particular, the presence of clay minerals is a favorable condition for the high efficiency of this process. This recovery concept is quite attractive as 50% of the world’s conventional petroleum reservoirs are found in sandstones that commonly contain clay minerals. It has been experimentally found that changes in the injected brine composition can improve waterflood performance by up to 38% (Larger et al. 2004, Web et al. 2004), leading to a new concept of optimal injection brine composition for water flood. In the 1990s, Jadhunandan and Morrow (1995) and Yildiz and Morrow (1996) reported the influence of brine composition on oil recovery, which identified a possibility to improve waterfloods with optimized injection brine formulation. Numerous laboratory experiments (Tang and Morrow, 1997; Morrow