Journal of Petroleum & Environmental Biotechnology

Abstract

Comparison Between Cold/Hot Smart Water Flooding in Sandstone Reservoirs

Hasan N Al-Saedi, Ariel Williams,Ralph E Flori

The incremental oil recovery has been investigated and approved by many laboratory and field projects using water flooding in tertiary stage. The salinity of the injected water is an important factor observed by many researchers. The more salinity decreases the more oil recovery obtained. The investigations on the hot low salinity water flooding have been conducted by many researchers and they found out that it is useful for increasing oil recovery especially heavy oil due to reducing oil viscosity and make it easy to produce to the surface. The thermal expansion of water plays an important role in the incremental oil recovery mechanism, reducing the density of the injected water relative to the aquifer water. This reduces mixing; minimizing thermal loses to the aquifer. Hot water flooding may also increase the economic life of individual wells by as much as a factor of two. Smart water was also used to alter the reservoir wettability and increase oil recovery by manipulating the divalent cations in the injected water. In this study, we used hot and cold smart water and injected both into the sandstone saturated with crude oil in order to investigate the important role of smart water itself and hot smart water. The systematic results showed that changing some cations in the injected brines was better than to spend more money to heat the smart water. The divalent cations Ca2+ and Mg2+ were the most effective component in the smart water. In this study, we also studied the pH effect of the cold/hot smart water effluent smart water EOR.