How Smart Waterflooding Can Improve The
Contemporary...
Smart waterflooding has recently proven more effective in improving the
contemporary recovery processes through the manipulation of the salinity and
compositions of the injected water. Different approaches have been tested by
various research groups to evaluate its effectiveness, such as brine dilution and
ionic variation. The brine dilution approach, also known as low salinity, which
involves lowering of the total brine salinity, has shown tremendous improvement
in oil recovery from core experiments using clay rich sandstone rocks in the range
of 5 30% oil originally in place (OOIP) (Jadhunandan and Morrow, 1995; Lager et
al., 2008; McGuire et al., 2005; Tang and Morrow, 1999; Webb et al., 2005; Yildiz
and Morrow, 1996). Similar improvements, between 3% and 19% OOIP, have been
observed in carbonate reservoirs, though the brine dilution effects and its underlying
mechanisms are more complex in carbonate than sandstone reservoirs (Austad et
al., 2011; Chandrasekhar and Mohanty, 2013; Romanuka et al., 2012; Yi and
Sarma, 2012; Yousef et al., 2011; Zahid et al., 2012). Essentially, this is because the
bonding energy between the carboxylic component of oil and carbonate rocks is
higher than with sandstone rocks (Awolayo et al., 2015). As a result, carbonate rocks
are oil wet, though not all, instead they are usually mixed wet subject to the nature of
the rock mineralsurface, oil properties, and their interactions (Anderson, 1986;
Donaldson et al., 1969; Morrow, 1990). It is the