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Enhanced Oil Recovery for Liquid-Rich Unconventional Shale Reservoirs Using Low-Salinity Surfactant and Wettability Altering Dilute Surfactants


 Classical waterflooding methods which rely on water displacing oil are not plausible in unconventional shale reservoirs because of the low permeability of such reservoirs because the pressure gradients required to push the water through the reservoir matrix rock is impractical. However, when the shale reservoir is stimulated via multistage hydraulic fracturing a large number of microfractures form which provides a preferred pathway when subsequently water is injected into the reservoir. If this water has low salinity compared to the salinity of the resident brine in the matrix pores, an osmotic pressure gradient establishes between microfractures and the matrix pores that would cause water to enter the matrix pores and pushing oil out. In oil-wet shale reservoirs, this osmotic pressure allows brine imbibition into the matrix that promotes counter-current flow of oil into the fractures. In our research, this phenomenon was studied via carefully designed osmotic imbibition experiments that used low- salinity brines. Furthermore, adding a simple surfactant, or a wettability altering chemical, not only could enhance imbibition of water into the matrix, it can also create a low-IFT environment that would break the oil droplets into smaller ones to facilitate oil movement out of the micro and macro fractures to enhance oil recovery from the matrix. To scale laboratory results and observations to the field conditions, a multi-component mass transport model that includes advective and diffusive transport of water molecules was developed and used to match experimental results. We will present the core imbibition and numerical modeling results that indicate that low salinity brine plus a dilute surfactant enhances oil production.
 This paper pertains to a research effort conducted to assess the potential of a new EOR method, which involves the use of a mixture of low-salinity brine and low-concentrations of a surfactant or wettability altering chemical. In what follows, we will present the core flooding and numerical modeling results pertaining to the research objective. The results are intended to be used as the basis for designing economic EOR field applications in unconventional shale reservoirs.