THE PERFORMANCE OF ENGINEERED WATER FLOODING TO ENHANCE HIGH VISCOUS OIL RECOVERY
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Date
2022
Authors
Ganiyeva, Aizada
Karabayanova, Leila
Pourafshary, Peyman
Hashmet, Muhammad Rehan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Applied Sciences
Abstract
Low salinity/engineered water injection is an effective enhanced oil recovery method, con firmed by many laboratory investigations. The success of this approach depends on different criteria
such as oil, formation brine, injected fluid, and rock properties. The performance of this method in
heavy oil formations has not been addressed yet. In this paper, data on heavy oil displacement by low
salinity water were collected from the literature and the experiments conducted by our team. In our
experiments, core flooding was conducted on an extra heavy oil sample to measure the incremental
oil recovery due to the injected brine dilution and ions composition. Our experimental results showed
that wettability alteration occurred during the core flooding as the main proposed mechanism of low
salinity water. Still, this mechanism is not strong enough to overcome capillary forces in heavy oil
reservoirs. Hence, weak microscopic sweep efficiency and high mobility ratio resulted in a small
change in residual oil saturation. This point was also observed in other oil displacement tests reported
in the literature. By analyzing our experiments and available data, it is concluded that the application
of standalone low salinity/engineered water flooding is not effective for heavy oil formations where
the oil viscosity is higher than 150 cp and high oil recovery is not expected. Hence, combining this
EOR method with thermal approaches is recommended to reduce the oil viscosity and control the
mobility ratio and viscous to capillary forces.
Description
Keywords
Type of access: Open Access, low salinity water, engineered water, viscosity, heavy oil, screening
Citation
Ganiyeva, A., Karabayanova, L., Pourafshary, P., & Hashmet, M. R. (2022). The Performance of Engineered Water Flooding to Enhance High Viscous Oil Recovery. Applied Sciences, 12(8), 3893. https://doi.org/10.3390/app12083893