Low Salinity Water Injection for EOR

Abstract
Low Salinity Waterflooding is one of the emerging oil recovery techniques which has
gained its popularity in the past decade. Many experiments and laboratory works have
been conducted since its oil recovery potential was discovered in late 1960s. Wettability
alteration in the reservoir is said to be the main cause in enhancing oil recovery.
Nevertheless, the effectiveness of this type of oil recovery is very much dependent on the
initial reservoir conditions, in particular, the connate water saturation, rock physics
and connate water salinity. This work is to run simulations on ECLIPSE 100 simulator to
show the effect of injecting low salinity water into a reservoir. A simple static model was
created to mimic a real reservoir.
Reservoir is of three phase with oil, gas and water and consists of one injector and one
producer just to simulate the effect of injecting a low salinity water and a normal salinity,
or seawater. Effect on oil recovery was observed by conducting sensitivity studies on rock
physics; both injection and reservoir brine salinity; tertiary recovery option; polymer
injection using low salinity water solution; and grid refinement. A difference of 14% in
oil recovery is observed when lower salinity water is used to inject
compared with normal salinity water. The effect on oil recovery also showed distinct
difference when the connate water salinity is changed with difference up to 28% with low
saline reservoir water. Polymer injection with low salinity water gave 4% increment in
recovery compared to injecting with higher salinity water for the same concentration of
polymer. This can indeed give better cost savings when opting for polymer injection,
where a lower concentration or amount of polymer is needed with the use of low salinity
water.

Introduction
In this modern era, the thirst for energy has increased by multiple folds, where the demand
for world energy is projected to increase by 40% by 2035 (Anon. a, 2014). Most of this
demand are fuelled by countries of emerging economies, in particular, China and India
(Anon. a, 2014). There are many types of energy sources available, but the primary source
comes from the oil and gas industry. Renewable energy is the emerging type of energy
source and the supply is projected to triple by 2035 (Anon. a, 2014; Anon. b, 2012).
Though, this will not be enough to fuel the entire global energy requirement. Thus, oil
and gas or fossil fuels will still be the primary energy source where it will contribute at
least 50% of the world’s energy needs in the future (Anon. a, 2014).
Low salinity water injection is an emerging oil recovery technique and it is found that
low salinity water, when injected into sandstone reservoir, increases the oil recovery by
8% – 12% - even up to 40% on secondary recovery at times (Lager et al., 2008). Water
injection is the most widely accepted technique worldwide to recover oil via pressure
maintenance. Since the most readily available type of water close to oil platforms is
seawater, the most widely used secondary injection is injecting seawater into the
reservoir (Collins, 2010). Many researches have been conducted on low salinity water
injection technique, since it was first introduced by Bernard (1967), where he noticed an
increase in oil recovery by low salinity water injection into a sandstone core due to
presence of clay.
The research work of Jadhunandhan and Morrow (1995) and by Yildiz and Morrow
(1996) showed the effect of crude-oil/brine/rock (COBR) interaction and the important
presence of all these factors in low salinity waterflooding. Their experiment proved that
the oil recovery was affected by not only the composition of reservoir water (or the initial
water saturation or connate water) but also the composition or salinity of the injected
water.
Tang and Morrow (1999) concluded that adsorption from crude oil, the presence of
potentially mobile fines and initial water saturations were all necessary conditions to
observe the positive effect of low salinity waterflooding. Berg et al. (2010) and Hussain
et al. (2013) have conducted laboratory experiments to support fines migration theory.
The reduction in permeability and pressure drop due to fines migration is found to be the
cause of increase in oil recovery as suggested by Hussain et al. (2013), Li (2011) and Pu
et al. (2010). Lager et. al (2006) conducted experiments to study the effect of Microscopic
Ionic Exchange or MIE. Webb et al. (2008) and Lee et al. (2010) also conducted
experiments to study effect of low salinity water on clay particles and how it effects the
wettability alteration. More papers were published by numerous researches
to support the wettability or ionic strength theory (Morrow et al., 1998; Jerauld et al.,
2006; Nasralla et al., 2011; Yousef et al., 2012; Kasmaei and Rao, 2014). Research work
done by Shiran and Skauge (2012) shows the aging effect of crude oil, where they
concluded that the older the oil, the more oil wet behaviour the system demonstrates.
Fjelde et al. (2014) studied effects of crude oil compositions on low salinity
waterflooding. It was shown in their work that both the ionic composition of injected
water and crude oil composition are crucial for the retention of polar oil components and
hence influences the wettability alterations.
The project will be run using ECLIPSE 100 Black Oil Simulator. A range of simulations
cases will be tested and recorded. The inputs will be based on previous research works
and this will help to run the simulations in a logical manner. A simple static model is to
be created with three phases and live oil. The
objectives of this work are:
i. to study the impact on oil recovery when water salinity is varied. The oil recovery
percentage are plotted against time and a variation of salinity are shown on different plots.
ii. to propose the optimum water salinity for injection into different rock types. This is
proposed via reservoir simulation technique. Graphs are plotted for recovery vs salinity.
The following assumptions are made for the reservoir:
i. The reservoir is an undersaturated reservoir. The oil exists high above the bubble point
pressure in the reservoir, and thus there will be no gas cap
ii. It is a homogenous reservoir in every layer. The porosity, permeability and other rock
properties are assumed to be constant throughout or within the layers of the reservoir.
iii. Relative permeability models are taken and modified from a reservoir representation
(Webb et al., 2008)