A novel method to model low salinity water injection in carbonate oil reservoirs

There are few low salinity water injection models proposed for carbonate rocks mainly because of incomplete understanding of complex chemical interactions between rock-oil-brine. This paper describes a new empirical method to model the low salinity water injection (LSWI) effect on oil recovery from carbonate rocks, based on the history matching and validation of recently published corefloods. In this model, the changes in water and oil relative permeability curves, as well as residual oil saturation, due to the LSWI effect are considered. The proposed model is implemented in the UTCHEM simulator to match and predict the multiple cycles of low salinity experiments. The screening criteria for using the proposed LSWI model are addressed in the paper. The developed model and the simulation results give more insight into the oil production potential of future waterflood projects using a modified water composition for injection.