ABSTRACT

Waterflooding is one of the methods in secondary recovery after primary recovery

declined. In industry, water flooding is a common method that they used but due to
the complexity of carbonate condition researcher had comes out with new technique.
This new technique is called as smart water by manipulating the salinity of injected
brine. The salinity of water was rarely considered in oil and gas industry and because
of this assumption, it give some problem on sandstone reservoir. Researcher have
investigated due to the problem occur that cause the injected water have lost inside
the formation and recovery factor started to decreased. The problem can be solving
by tuning the salinity of water injected to improve recovery factor. The present paper
present the study on smart water as wettability modifier for enhance oil recovery
(EOR) in carbonate reservoir. One of the reason water was injected into reservoir to
maintain reservoir pressure is less expensive and available compared to the other
EOR methods. The smart water was prepared with different concentrations of brine
solution by using deionize water, CaCl2 and seawater. The characterizations of the
smart water were carried out using UV-Vis and VCA 3000S Goniometer. The
contact angle for each brine solution was tested and the result shows that less
concentration will have less contact angle with 32o after 13 hours. The flooding
method was conducted by using the formation field seawater as secondary recovery.
After the secondary recovery is declined, EOR method was applied for 2, 10, 20 and
100 times dilute seawater. The recovery factor for each brine solution has been
recorded. The result shows that brine solution of 10 times dilute seawater has the
highest recovery factor with 80.4 % original oil in placed (OOIP). The recovery
factor was increase from 70 % to 80.4 % OOIP. In conclusion, smart waterflooding
is a new technique to solve the complexity problem of carbonate reservoir by
manipulating the salinity and ionic composition with high temperature. Hence, smart
water can be excellent candidate as a displacing fluid in chemical flooding to
increase the oil recovery.