The Necessity of Choosing the Right Injection Scenario; How Can This Affect Low Salinity Waterflooding Results?

Several research studies are available in the literature, representing the low salinity waterflooding process efficiency and its governing mechanisms. In the case of application and decision-making, it’s crucial to properly upscale the laboratory results to the field scale. Although there are many published articles on this area in the literature, still there are open questions such as: Do coreflooding experiments mimic the reservoir conditions? Which injection scenario is closer to the reservoir reality, secondary or tertiary? Which one should be considered for upscaling and any further decision-making? It’s obvious that in case we upscale lab data which does not mimic the real reservoir conditions, the outcomes would not be reliable for any predictions in field scale. Therefore, this research aims to investigate the effect of brine composition on oil recovery from chalk reservoirs by introducing a new tertiary injection scenario to mimic more accurately the reservoir condition. Then the results from this newly proposed method are compared with the standard type of coreflooding experiments in order to evaluate the time dependency of low salinity waterflooding and address the potential challenges.