Literature review

Waterflooding is defined as a secondary recovery method in which water is

injected into a

reservoir to obtain additional oil recovery through displacement of reservoir

oil towards

producing wells (Thomas et al., 1962). Additionally, the term water-pressure

maintenance has

been used to describe a process whereby water is injected into an oil-

producing reservoir to

supplement the natural energy that is indigenous to the reservoir, thereby

improving the oil

producing characteristics of the field before the economically productive

limits are reached.

Waterflooding is now accepted worldwide as a reliable and economic

recovery technique

and almost every significant oil field that does not have a natural water drive
has been, is being,

or will be considered for waterflooding. Waterflooding depends on many

factors, including

reservoir geometry, lithology, reservoir depth, porosity, absolute

permeability, continuity of

reservoir rock properties, magnitude and distribution of fluid saturations,

fluid properties, and
relative permeability. Attention must also be paid to other factors such as oil
price, operating

cost, availability of water source, and environmental impact.

This review of LSW literature highlights the need for a more systematic study
of the process and for developing a mechanistic model for design, prediction,
and optimization of LSW at both the laboratory and field scales.

The level of investigation into low-salinity Waterflooding has sharply

increased in the past three years as more research groups have become
involved (Webb et al. 2008, Alotaibi and Nasr_el_Din 2009, Austad et al.
2010, Boussour et al. 2009, Cissokho et al. 2009, Kumar et al. 2010, Lager et
al. 2008, Patil et al. 2008, Seccombe et al. 2008, Pu et al. 2010, Rivet et al.
2010, RezaeiDoust et al. 2010, Gamage and Thyne 2011)[3-14]. Laboratory
studies with synthetic formation water, reservoir and outcrop rocks and
reservoir oil have been conducted with injected water diluted by a factor
ranging from 2.5 to 100-fold compared to formation water. Many studies
have reported increases in recovery of 2-30% original-oil-in-place (OOIP)
varying with brine and crude oil compositions and rock types used

. However, while both laboratory and field studies have had successful
results, there are also examples in which low-salinity flooding does not create
additional production (Sharma and Filoco 2000, Rivet et al 2010,
Skrettingland et al. 2010)[15,16,17]. During the last two decades a
significant body of evidence has accumulated, indicating that recovery from
sandstone oil reservoirs could be improved by lowering the ionic strength of
the injection brine (reviewed in Morrow and Buckley 2011)[18]. Benefits of
low salinity as opposed to high salinity water flooding have been supported
by numerous laboratory tests (reviewed in Sheng 2010)[19], Log-Inject-Log
trial (Webb et al. 2004)[3], single well chemical tracer tests (McGuire et al.
2005)[20], and historical data (Vledder 2010)[21]. An extensively discussed
mechanism behind this low salinity phenomenon in sandstones is wettability
alteration of the clay minerals towards a more water-wet state which in turn
improves microscopic sweep by modifying oil and water relative
permeabilities (Ligthelm et al. 2009)[22]. Despite growing interest in low
salinity flooding, a consistent explanation of the wettability alteration
mechanism has not yet emerged. However, it is generally accepted in the
industry that injecting brine with TDS (Totally Dissolved Solids) below 5,000
ppm leads to additional oil recovery whereas injection of more saline water
will not (Webb et al. 2005)[5].

Mohammadi and Jerauld (2012) used numerical simulation to investigate the

benefit of

combining polymer with LSW for EOR. The idea is that the use of low-salinity
EOR can make use of polyacrylamide polymer, which is effective at reservoir
temperatures up to 100oC, and can

enable the use of polymers with larger degrees of hydrolysis. Polyacrylamide

solution viscosity

increases as salinity decreases so the operational expenditure (OPEX) will

reduce due to lower polymer concentration. The authors used the VIPTM
simulator, which is BPs in-house simulator,

to model the combination of these two processes. This model was tested in
both heterogeneous

and homogeneous reservoirs in secondary and tertiary modes. From their

simulation, a third less

polymers (or less) was required for polymer floods that employ low-salinity
brine as the base

fluid compared with those that use high-salinity brine as the base fluid. The
LSW model used in
this research, however, originally came from Jerauld et al. (2008) with a
simple interpolation of

relative permeability based on total salinity concentration, which is very

simplistic, as discussed

earlier.

Korrani et al. (2013) coupled IPHREEQC, an open-source geochemical module

from the

United States Geological Survey, with UTCHEM, a research chemical-flooding

reservoir

simulator developed at the University of Texas at Austin, for modeling LSW.

The authors used

only simple case studies to compare the ion exchange between UTCHEM-
IPHREEQC and the

original IPHREEQC. These comparisons have not provided additional insights

since the ion

exchange model used in UTCHEM-IPHREEQC was adapted from the one used
in the original

IPRHEEQC module. The results from this model should be validated against
coreflood

experiments and field observations.