Organizations: European Research CouncilEuropean Research Council (ERC)European Commission [648375]; BP Ltd.
Previous macroscopic core flooding tests have shown that injecting low-salinity water improves oil recovery in sandstone and carbonate reservoirs through wettability alteration. However, consistent mechanistic clarification of the underlying physicochemical mechanisms involved in oil wettability at the pore-scale level is not fully understood. In this work, a microfluidic approach is used to provide in situ visualization of oil-brine flow to give an indication of the micromechanisms affecting oil sweep efficiency. The potential of enhancing oil recovery by low-salinity flooding at the microscale is also investigated, which would help in predicting a reservoir's performance before committing to production processes at a large field scale. Two types of crude oils with various acid numbers were used, and hydrophilic and hydrophobic physical microstructures were used to mimic sandstones and carbonates. The results revealed a reduction by 7-10% in the residual oil for the water-wet microstructure when the seawater was diluted twice from its original concentration, apparently due to a decrease in the attractive forces. There is no change in the recovery factor for the oil-wet micromodel for the two kinds of crude oils examined. Tertiary low-salinity flooding did not show any effect on the initial wetting state of the hydrophobic surface, rendering it with a strongly oil-wet condition. It is also observed that flow dynamics of the two microstructures examined are different, as the snap-off-coalesce phenomenon dominants the flow in the water-wet system, while oil moved by a piston-like displacement with a stable or irregular front in the hydrophobic system. In contrast to some of the published macroscopic results, our pore-scale displacement shows that low-salinity flooding seems to be an unsuitable choice for enhanced oil recovery for strongly oil-wet reservoirs.
