%0 Journal Article
%T Mysteries behind the Low Salinity Water Injection Technique
%A Emad Waleed Al-Shalabi
%A Kamy Sepehrnoori
%A Gary Pope
%J Journal of Petroleum Engineering
%D 2014
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2014/304312
%X Low salinity water injection (LSWI) is gaining popularity as an improved oil recovery technique in both secondary and tertiary injection modes. The objective of this paper is to investigate the main mechanisms behind the LSWI effect on oil recovery from carbonates through history-matching of a recently published coreflood. This paper includes a description of the seawater cycle match and two proposed methods to history-match the LSWI cycles using the UTCHEM simulator. The sensitivity of residual oil saturation, capillary pressure curve, and relative permeability parameters (endpoints and Corey¡¯s exponents) on LSWI is evaluated in this work. Results showed that wettability alteration is still believed to be the main contributor to the LSWI effect on oil recovery in carbonates through successfully history matching both oil recovery and pressure drop data. Moreover, tuning residual oil saturation and relative permeability parameters including endpoints and exponents is essential for a good data match. Also, the incremental oil recovery obtained by LSWI is mainly controlled by oil relative permeability parameters rather than water relative permeability parameters. The findings of this paper help to gain more insight into this uncertain IOR technique and propose a mechanistic model for oil recovery predictions. 1. Introduction Oil recovery from carbonate rocks is a challenge due to the high fracture density and the rock wettability state which ranges from mixed-wet to oil-wet. One of the recently recommended improved oil recovery (IOR) techniques is low salinity water injection (LSWI), which is believed to shift the wettability state of the rock towards more water-wet state. The LSWI technique has several advantages including high efficiency in displacing light to medium gravity crude oils, ease of injection into oil-bearing formations, availability and affordability of water, and lower capital and operating costs compared to other IOR methods, which leads to favorable economics. Other names proposed in the literature for the same mechanism are LoSal, Smart Waterflood, and Advanced Ion Management. The LSWI effect on oil recovery from carbonates was shown both at laboratory scale and to a limited extent at field scale. Although most researchers believe that wettability alteration is the main mechanism for the LSWI on oil recovery from carbonates, there are others who believe in the presence of other contributing mechanisms. Therefore, work is still progressing to understand the chemical interactions in crude oil-brine-rock (COBR) in the porous media. The LSWI
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jpe/2014/304312/