Abstract
Low salinity waterflooding is an emerging EOR technique in which the salinity of the injected water is substantially reduced to improve oil recovery over conventional higher salinity waterflooding. Although there are many low salinity experimental results reported in the literature, publications on modeling this process are rare. While there remains some debate about the mechanisms of LoSal®1 EOR, the geochemical reactions that control the wetting of crude oil on the rock are likely to be central to a detailed description of the process. Since no comprehensive geochemical-based modeling has been applied in this area, it was decided to couple a state-of-the-art geochemical package, IPhreeqc, developed by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) with UTCOMP, the compositional reservoir simulator developed by The University of Texas at Austin.
A step-by-step algorithm is presented for integrating IPhreeqc with UTCOMP. Through this coupling, we are able to simulate homogeneous and heterogeneous (mineral dissolution/precipitation), irreversible, and ion-exchange reactions under non-isothermal, non-isobaric and both local-equilibrium (away from the wellbore) and kinetic (near wellbore) conditions. Consistent with the literature, there are significant effects of water-soluble hydrocarbon components (e.g., CO2, CH4, and acidic/basic components of the crude) on buffering the aqueous pH and more generally, on the crude oil, brine, and rock reactions. Thermodynamic constrains are used to explicitly include the effect of these water-soluble hydrocarbon components. Hence, this combines the geochemical power of IPhreeqc with the important aspects of hydrocarbon flow and compositional effects to produce a robust, flexible, and accurate integrated tool capable of including the reactions needed to mechanistically model low salinity waterflooding.
Different geochemical-based approaches to modeling wettability change in sandstones (e.g., interpolation based on total ionic strength and Multicomponent Ion Exchange through surface complexation of the organometallic components) were implemented in UTCOMP-IPhreeqc and the integrated tool is then used to match and interpret a low salinity experiment published by Kozaki (2012) and the field trial done by BP at the Endicott field.
