Low Salinity Waterflooding for a Carbonate Reservoir Experimental Evaluation and Numerical Interpretation
Authors: Nasralla Ramez A. , van der Linde Hilbert A. , Marcelis Fons H. , Mahani Hassan , Masalmeh Shehadeh K. , Sergienko Ekaterina , Brussee Niels J. , Pieterse Sebastiaan G. , Basu Saptarshi 
Published: November 2016

Several laboratory tests have already demonstrated the potential of lowering/manipulating the injected brine salinity and composition to improve oil recovery in carbonate reservoirs. However, laboratory SCAL tests are still required to screen low salinity waterflood (LSF) for a particular field to (i) ensure that there is LSF response in the studied rock/oil/brine system, (ii) find the optimal brine salinity, (iii) extract relative permeability curves to be used in the reservoir simulation model and quantify the benefit of LSF and (iv) examine the compatibility of injected brine with formation brine and rock to de-risk any potential formation damage or scaling.

This paper presents an extensive LSF SCAL study for one of the carbonate reservoirs and the numerical interpretation of the tests. The experiments were performed at reservoir conditions using representative reservoir core plugs, crude oil and synthetic brines. The rock was characterized using different measurements and techniques such as porosity, permeability, semi-quantitative X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and mercury intrusion capillary pressure (MICP). The characterization work showed that the plugs can be classified into two groups (uni-modal and bi-modal) based on porosity/permeability correlation and pore throat size distribution.

The SCAL experiments were divided in two categories. Firstly, spontaneous imbibition and qualitative unsteady-state (USS) experiments were performed to demonstrate the effect of low salinity brines. In addition, these experiments helped to screen different brines (seawater and different dilutions of seawater) in order to choose the optimal brine composition that showed the most promising effect. Secondly, quantitative unsteady-state (USS) experiments were conducted and modeled using numerical simulation to extract relative permeability curves for high salinity and low salinity brines by history-matching production and pressure data. Moreover, the pressure drop was monitored during all tests to evaluate any risk of formation damage.

The main conclusions of the study: 1- The spontaneous imbibition and qualitative USS experiments showed extra oil production due to wettability alteration when switching from formation brine to seawater or diluted seawater subsequently, 2- Oil recovery by LSF can be maximized by injection of brine at a certain salinity threshold, at which lowering the brines salinity further may not lead to additional recovery improvement, 3- The LSF effect and optimal brine salinity varied in different layers of the reservoir, 4- The quantitative USS showed that LSF can improve the oil recovery factor by up to 7% at core scale compared to formation brine injection.

This paper proves the potential of LSF to improve oil recovery in carbonate rock. However, the results demonstrate that the effect of LSF may vary in different layers within the same carbonate reservoir, which indicates that LSF effect is very dependent on the rock properties/mineralogy.