Optimisation of Smart Water to Enhance Oil Recovery Efficiency in a Part of Oil Field of Upper Assam Basin, India
Bhaskarjyoti Saikia1, Minati Das2
1Bhaskarjyoti Saikia*, Department of Petroleum Engineering, DUIET, Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh, Assam, India.
2Prof. Minati Das, Department of Petroleum Technology, Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh, Assam, India,
Manuscript received on November 21, 2019. | Revised Manuscript received on December 15, 2019. | Manuscript published on December 30, 2019. | PP: 3620-3626 | Volume-9 Issue-2, December, 2019. | Retrieval Number: B3285129219/2019©BEIESP | DOI: 10.35940/ijeat.B3285.129219
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© The Authors. Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: Researchers have proved the significance of water injection by tuning its composition and salinity into the reservoir during smart water flooding. Once the smart water invades through the pore spaces, it destabilises crude oil-brine-rock (COBR) that leads to change in wettability of the reservoir rocks. During hydrocarbon accumulation and migration, polar organic compounds were being adsorbed on the rock surface making the reservoir oil/mixed wet in nature. Upon invasion of smart water, due to detachment of polar compounds from the rock surfaces, the wettability changes from oil/mixed wet to water wet thus enhances the oil recovery efficiency. The objective of this paper is to find optimum salinity and ionic composition of the synthetic brines at which maximum oil recovery would be observed. Three core flood studies have been conducted in the laboratory to investigate the effect of pH, composition and salinity of the injected brine over oil recovery. Every time, flooding has been conducted at reservoir formation brine salinity i.e at 1400 ppm followed by different salinities. Here, tertiary mode of flooding has been carried out for two core samples while secondary flooding for one. Results showed maximum oil recovery by 40.12% of original oil in place (OOIP) at 1050ppm brine salinity at secondary mode of flooding. So, optimized smart water has been proposed with 03 major salts, KCl, MgCl2 and CaCl2 in secondary mode of flooding that showed maximum oil recovery in terms of original oil in place.
Keywords: COBR Interactions, Oil Recovery Efficiency, Polar Compounds, Smart Water, Wettability Alteration