Experimental assessment of hybrid smart carbonated water flooding for carbonate reservoirs

Abstract

Different methods of enhanced oil recovery have been used to produce trapped oil. One of these methods is carbonated water injection in which CO2 contained water is injected in reservoirs in order to decrease free CO2 injection mobility, increase water viscosity and store/remove produced greenhouse CO2 gas safely. Another enhanced oil recovery method is smart water injection at which the ions in brine are modified in order to make controlled reactions with distributed ions on the surface of rock to cause more hydrocarbon recovery. Therefore, combination of these two methods may also have a great effect on enhancing oil recovery or may result in recovery factor less than each method used alone. In this paper hybrid smart carbonated water injection method is investigated to study its applicability in oil recovery using core flooding setup. The experimental core flooding setup was designed to perform different types of EOR methods for the sake of recovery comparison with the new hybrid method. The effect of both brine content and volume of CO2 is determining in hybrid EOR assessment. The main findings of this work show that the hybrid smart carbonated water results in the highest recovery factor in comparison to the most well-known EOR methods for carbonate cores.

Keywords

• Hybrid smart carbonated water
• Carbonated water
• Smart water
• Core flooding
• Carbonate cores