Experimental studies of low salinity water flooding in carbonate reservoirs: A new promising approach

Low salinity water flooding is well studied for sandstone reservoirs, both laboratory and field tests have showed improvement in the oil recovery in many cases. Up to very recently, the low salinity effect has been indeterminated for carbonates. Most recently, Saudi Aramco reported that substantial additional oil recovery can be achieved when successively flooding composite carbonate core plugs with various diluted versions of seawater.

The experimental data on carbonates is very limited, so more data and better understanding of the mechanisms involved is needed to utilize this method for carbonate reservoirs. In this paper, we have experimentally investigated the oil recovery potential of low salinity water flooding for carbonate rocks.

We used both reservoir carbonate and outcrop chalk core plugs. The flooding experiments were carried out initially with the seawater, and afterwards additional oil recovery was evaluated by sequential injection of various diluted seawater. The experiments applied stepwise increase in flow rate to eliminate the influence of possible capillary end effect.

The total oil recovery, interaction of the different ions with the rock, and the wettability changes were studied both at ambient and high temperature. No low salinity effect was observed for the reservoir carbonate core plug at the ambient temperature, but increase of the pressure drop over the core plug was detected.

On the contrary, a significant increase in oil recovery was observed under low salinity flooding of the reservoir carbonate core plugs at 90°C. An increase in pressure drop was also observed in this case, possibly related to migration of fines or dissolution reactions. The outcrop Aalborg chalk core plugs did not show any low salinity effect, both at the room and at a high temperature.

In the light of experimental results, discussions are made about possible mechanisms for improving oil recovery in carbonate reservoir as a function of change in brine salinity. Copyright 2012, Society of Petroleum Engineers.