Low Salinity Water Flooding (LSWF)

Does the performance of LSWF (where, the injection water with a tuned chemical composition remains injected into the reservoir, filled originally with the formation brine and crude oil), which remains associated with multiple pore-scale physio-chemical factors including crude oil chemistry, formation brine chemistry, injected water chemistry, reservoir temperature, rock mineralogy and transport and mixing of injected low-salinity water – not only depend on Peclet Number (ratio between advective to dispersive transport)?

Does it become both saturation-dependent as well as flow rate-dependent as multi-phase fluid flow through an oil reservoir remains no more associated with a homogeneous saturated porous medium, where a Fickian transport could be expected?

Feasible to decompose total water saturation into flowing saturation (contributing to hydrodynamic solute transport & to the effective phase permeability), stagnant saturation (behaving as a source/sink term for the transport process; and do not contribute to relative permeability) & disconnected saturation (trapped regions that contribute neither to transport nor to flow process)?

How exactly to have a control over the mass exchange between flowing regions (by advection) and stagnant regions – resulting from the concentration gradient across the interface between flowing and stagnant regions?

Does LSWF require the evaluation of transport parameters including dispersion coefficient, mass exchange rate coefficient, effective pore velocity and stagnant saturation?

Dr Suresh Kumar Govindarajan,

Professor [HAG],

IIT-Madras

27-Feb-2025