Development of Hybrid EOR Methods Utilizing Low Salinity Water

Faculty Development Competitive Research Grant Program 2019-2021

Maximizing the production and recovery of oil from existing assets is a constant challenge for operators all around the world. It was observed that changing injected water salinity and ion composition affects and improves the oil recovery. Combination of this approach with other EOR methods can significantly improve the oil recovery. Therefore, our research focus on studying the performance of LSW/SW hybrid EOR methods in oil recovery. The main strategy in our approaches is to develop hybrid methods to affect microscopic/macroscopic sweep efficiencies in porous media to overcome drawbacks of well-known waterflooding/EOR methods. In this work, our main idea is to develop hybrid “smart/low salinity water” based flooding approaches to enhance the performance of waterflooding. A complete experimental/modeling study will lead us to a successful design to increase the oil recovery by a low-cost method.