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Waterflooding has been regarded as an efficient method for pressure maintenance of oil reservoirs. x Improved techniques such as Smart Water flooding as a new EOR/IOR process has gained more momentum based on the recent research activities in this field and the reduction of oil price. Despite many efforts on achieving the governing mechanisms of Smart Water flooding in many individual fields, most of data are sparse and more possible mechanisms which explains all the interactions yet to be introduced. This experimental study used a systematic laboratory framework which is based on seawater treatments at fixed ionic strength to eliminate the ionic strength effects, NaCl considered as the... 

In this work, application of silica nanoparticles for wettability alteration of initially oil-wet calcite was investigated through analysis of surface forces and DLVO theory. Doing so, the wettability and zeta potential of calcite surfaces were measured through the sessile drop method and an in-house experimental setup, respectively. Primary evaluation indicated that incorporating DLVO terms in the Frumkin-Derjaguin model was not sufficient to describe the wettability in an oil-wet calcite/nanofluid system. Sensitivity analysis showed that calculating the double-layer interaction using constant potential-constant potential boundaries along with structural hydrophobic forces (non-DLVO... 

Although several investigations have studied the low-salinity water injection (LSWI) performance during the past decades, the effect of crude oil type on the interfacial tension (IFT) and wettability alteration is still in dark. In this regard, this study is aimed to obtain the thermodynamic energies including adhesion, cohesion and spreading coefficient during LSWI. To achieve this goal, IFT and static contact angle values of three different crude oils (i.e. light, medium and heavy) are measured as a function of sea water salinity. The obtained results revealed that the dilution of sea water can change the wettability of reservoir rock from oil wet state towards water wet state, while crude... 

Acidizing of carbonate oil-wet rocks saturated with oil and saline formation water is subjected failure in some cases due to acid-induced damage such as sludge and emulsion formations. This condition may also lead to mineral precipitation, oil film barrier between acid and rock and diversion chemical malfunctions. Therefore, pre-flush process has been proposed as one of the most efficient stage for oil-wells matrix acidizing to reduce these challenges significantly. Besides, the pre-flush stage would result in more clean rock as the reservoir fluids are pushed back from the near wellbore regions, restoring rock wettability to more water wet state, preventing direct acid-oil contact and... 

Productivity of gas condensate reservoirs reduces significantly due to the near wellbore condensate/water blockage phenomenon. A novel, permanent solution to alleviate this problem is near wellbore wettability alteration of reservoir rocks to preferentially gas wetting conditions; industrial chemical materials are good candidates for this purpose, because of their eco-friendly characteristics, economical price, and mass production. In this paper, a comparative study is conducted on two industrial fluorinated chemicals, MariSeal 800 and SurfaPore M. Static and dynamic contact angle measurements, spontaneous imbibition, and core flooding tests were conducted to investigate the effect of... 

In the current study, a novel approach which takes into account the effectiveness of both convectional surfactants and biosurfactants was investigated. The biosurfactant produced by Enterobacter cloacae strain was utilized concomitant with conventional surfactant (sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate (SDBS)) to evaluate its capability to reduce the SDBS adsorption on rock surface (biosurfactant acts as sacrificial agent) or synergistically enhance the effectiveness of the SDBS. In this regard, the wettability alteration and interfacial tension (IFT) measurements and calculation of spreading coefficient were performed considering two different scenarios. In the first scenario, SDBS was added to... 

Low salinity (LS) and smart water (SW) flooding processes which receive a great interest as cost-effective and environmental friendly techniques are relatively new enhanced oil recovery methods. Although shifting carbonate surfaces towards a water-wet state is the main mechanism behind these methods, effects of controlling factors (for instance: ion type or salinity) are already remained unsettled. In this regard, the effects of sulfate ion types (i.e. Na2SO4, MgSO4 and CaSO4) and their concentrations (i.e. 0–45,000 ppm) on wettability alteration are investigated using contact angle (CA) measurement technique. In addition, work of cohesion, work of adhesion and spreading coefficient of all... 

The influx of solid or liquid particles of drilling mud into the pores of rock or mud loss phenomenon and clay swelling can sometimes lead to severe productive formation damage and cause to wettability alterations of reservoir rock from hydrophilic to oleophilic. Therefore, designing an appropriate fluid that is compatible with formation fluids and could reduce reservoir damage and increase the productivity of wells is very important. The two main mechanisms of surfactants are reduction of the surface tension and wettability alteration of rock reservoir that are effective in taking the oil. Regarding the importance of the wettability in reservoir productivity, this article is aimed to study... 

In this paper, the effect of silica nanoparticles on oil production due to the spontaneous imbibition of brine into oil-wet sandstones has been studied. The imbibed fluids were NaCl 3 wt. % solutions containing various concentrations of nanoparticles and the recovered oil for each solution was compared. The results revealed that nanoparticles yielded more oil recovery. Nanofluid was used after brine imbibition, and the oil recovery increased from 17.8% to 40% while in the case of using the same nanofluid as the first imbibed fluid the oil recovery was 53%. Also, the results indicated that the oil recovery depends on nanoparticle concentrations. © 2019, © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC  

The efficiency of water flooding methods is known to improve by applying ion-tuned water injection. Although there is a consensus that such improvement happens through reversing reservoir wettability characteristics to more water-wet state, the true impact of ions is still ambiguous among contradictory debates. The well-known molecular dynamics (MD) simulation techniques would shed light on such ambiguities to gain deep atomic-scale understanding of the process. Results from MD simulations show that the presence of Na+ and Cl¯ ions leads to the formation of an electrical double layer in adjacency of calcite surface while Mg2+ ions dominantly make complexes with hydrocarbons throughout the... 

This study aims to investigate the role of fluid-fluid interactions during low salinity water flooding, using crude oil from an Iranian oil reservoir. To minimize the effects of mineral heterogeneity and wettability alteration, a synthetic sintered glass core was utilized and all coreflooding experiments were performed at low temperatures without any aging process. The effect of fluid-fluid interactions were investigated in both secondary and tertiary injection modes. pH measurements as well as UV-Vis spectroscopy and interfacial tension (IFT) analysis were performed on the effluent brine samples. Results: show that fluid-fluid interactions, mainly the dissolution of crude oil polar... 

The influx of solid or liquid particles of drilling mud into the pores of rock or mud loss phenomenon and clay swelling can sometimes lead to severe productive formation damage and cause to wettability alterations of reservoir rock from hydrophilic to oleophilic. Therefore, designing an appropriate fluid that is compatible with formation fluids and could reduce reservoir damage and increase the productivity of wells is very important. The two main mechanisms of surfactants are reduction of the surface tension and wettability alteration of rock reservoir that are effective in taking the oil. Regarding the importance of the wettability in reservoir productivity, this article is aimed to study... 

Application of nanoparticles for wettability alteration offers a practical approach to resolve some surface-related problems encountered in the nowadays technological process. Examples are underground/subsurface engineering implications, including the enhanced oil recovery from the oil-wet carbonate reservoirs. However, the common wettability evaluating techniques such as contact angle and flotation cannot be representative of the dynamic phenomena occurring at the pore scale and hence are unable to give accurate information about the process. Therefore, in the present work, the electrokinetic evaluations are utilized to explore the wettability alteration of initially oil-wet carbonate rock... 

Wettability alteration of rock surfaces toward gas wetting have been recognized as a practical approach for maximizing the production from the gas condensate reservoirs. Most of the reported work in this area applied the so called sessile drop contact angle measurement technique to examine the change in wetting state of a surface. However, the size-dependent wetting behavior of drop which could affect the exact determination of wettability and wettability changes was not well discussed in the previous studies. Therefore, in this work, the size dependency of contact angle for four different liquid-solid-gas systems; i.e., water-calcite-air, water-treated calcite-air (nanofluid treated... 

Despite previous researches on ion-engineered waterflooding (IEWF), its underlying mechanisms are not fully understood, particularly in presence of additives, like surfactants. This paper concerned with the contribution of Ca 2+ , Mg 2+ , SO 4 2- and Na + into altering wettability of oil-wet carbonate minerals towards water preferred state. As a mechanistic study, an experiment workflow was conducted to probe the impact of ions' concentrations in SW, either with or without sodium dodecylbenzene sulfonate (SDBS) which is an anionic surfactant. At first, contact angle (CA) measurement was carried out to evaluate the degree of wettability reversal upon treating the oil-aged calcite slabs with... 

The bacterial strain MJ01 was isolated from stock tank water of one of the Iranian south oil field production facilities. The 16S rRNA gene of isolate, MJ01, showed 99% similarity to Bacillus subtilis. The results revealed that biosurfactant produced by this strain was lipopeptide-like surfactin based on FTIR analysis. Critical micelle concentration of produced surfactin in distilled water was 0.06 g/l. Wettability study showed that at zero salinity surfactin can change original oil-wet state to water-wet state, but in seawater salinity it cannot modify the wettability significantly. To utilize this biosurfactant in ex situ MEOR process, economical and reservoir engineering technical... 

Low salinity waterflooding (LSWF) is a process in which by lowering the ionic strength and/or manipulation of the composition of the injection water, the long term equilibrium in oil/brine/rock system is disturbed to reach a new state of equilibrium through which the oil production will be enhanced due to fluid/fluid and/or rock/fluid interactions. In spite of recent advances in the simulation of the LSWF at core scale and beyond, there are very few works that have modelled and simulated this process at the pore scale specially using direct numerical simulation (DNS). As a result the effects of wettability alteration and/or Interfacial Tension (IFT) change on the distribution of the phases... 

Wettability alteration analysis form gas-repellent to gas-wet with the aid of chemical agents has been subjected of numerous studies. However, fundamental understanding of the effect of surface tension of liquid on repellency strength, the change in the intermolecular forces due to the adsorption of nanoparticles onto the rock surfaces, and exposure of treated rock in brine are not well discussed in the available literature. In this study, X-ray diffraction, Atomic Force Microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy were applied to characterize the treated and fresh samples. Dynamic and static contact angle measurements were then combined with six methods... 

In this study, the effect of hydrophobicity of environmentally responsive surface-modified silica nanoparticles on the stability and surface activity of the nanoparticles is examined. To this end, n-propyl, n-hexyl, or n-octyl chains and methoxy poly(ethylene glycol) chains at various quantities were coated covalently on the surface of silica nanoparticles to regulate the hydrophobicity of the responsive nanoparticles. Various experimental tools such as stability analysis, interfacial-tension and contact-angle measurements, and emulsion formation were performed to investigate the effect of hydrophobicity. It became evident that the presence of the hydrophobic agents influences considerably... 

In upstream oil industry, microorganisms arise some opportunities and challenges. They can increase oil recovery through microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) mechanisms, or they can increase production costs and risks through reservoir souring process due to H2S gas production. MEOR is mostly known by bioproducts such as biosurfactant or processes such as bioclogging or biodegradation. On the other hand, when it comes to treatment of reservoir souring, the only objective is to inhibit reservoir souring. These perceptions are mainly because decision makers are not aware of the effect microorganisms’ cell can individually have on the wettability. In this work, we study the individual effect...