Imperial College London
Alternate

Dr. Samuel Krevor

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Earth Science & Engineering

Reader in Carbon Sequestration Studies
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 2701s.krevor

 
 
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Location

 

1.43Royal School of MinesSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Andrews:2023:10.1016/j.fuel.2022.126155,
author = {Andrews, E and Muggeridge, A and Jones, A and Krevor, S},
doi = {10.1016/j.fuel.2022.126155},
journal = {Fuel: the science and technology of fuel and energy},
pages = {1--15},
title = {Pore structure and wetting alteration combine to produce the low salinity effect on oil production},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fuel.2022.126155},
volume = {332},
year = {2023}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Low salinity water flooding is a promising enhanced oil recovery technique that has been observed, in experiments over a range of scales, to increase oil production by up to 14% in some systems. However, there is still no way of reliably predicting which systems will respond favourably to the technique. This shortcoming is partly because of a relative lack of pore scale observations of low salinity water flooding. This has led to a poor understanding of how mechanisms on the scale of micrometres lead to changes in fluid distribution on the scale of centimetres to reservoir scales. In this work, we use X-ray micro-CT scanning to image unsteady state experiments of tertiary low salinity water flooding in Berea, Castlegate, and Bunter sandstone micro-cores. We observe fluid saturations and characterise the wetting state of samples using imagery of fluid–solid fractional wetting and pore occupancy analysis. In the Berea sample, we observed an additional oil recovery of 3 percentage points during low salinity water flooding, with large volumes of oil displaced from small pores but also re-trapping of mobilised oil in large pores. In the Bunter sandstone, we observed 4 percentage point additional recovery with significant displacement of oil from small pores and no significant retrapping of oil in large pores. However, in the Castlegate sample, we observed just 1 percentage point of additional recovery and relatively small volumes of oil mobilisation. We observe a significant wettability alteration towards more water-wet conditions in the Berea and Bunter sandstones, but no significant alteration in the Castlegate sample. We hypothesise that pore structure, specifically the topology of large pores impacted recovery. We find that poor connectivity of the largest pores in each sample is strongly correlated to additional recovery. This work is the first systematic comparison of the pore scale response to low salinity flooding across multiple sandstone samples. Moreover
AU  - Andrews,E
AU  - Muggeridge,A
AU  - Jones,A
AU  - Krevor,S
DO  - 10.1016/j.fuel.2022.126155
EP  - 15
PY  - 2023///
SN  - 0016-2361
SP  - 1
TI  - Pore structure and wetting alteration combine to produce the low salinity effect on oil production
T2  - Fuel: the science and technology of fuel and energy
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fuel.2022.126155
UR  - https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000874586800005&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
UR  - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016236122029799?via%3Dihub
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/100438
VL  - 332
ER  -
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