An Electrokinetic Study of Amino Acid and Potential-Determining Ions for Enhanced Waterflooding in Carbonate Reservoirs

Abstract

Summary Reservoir rock wettability plays an important role in waterflooding especially in fractured carbonate reservoirs because oil recovery tends to be inefficient from the mixed-wet or oil-wet rock matrix. Improved oil recovery has been observed by adjusting the concentrations of potential-determining ions (PDIs) to alter the wettability of carbonate rocks. Our previous study showed that the oil recovery from carbonate reservoirs by waterflooding can be enhanced by the addition of glycine, the simplest amino acid. The interaction of glycine anion and oil-wet carbonate surfaces was confirmed in contact angle measurements and yielded the incremental oil recovery in imbibition experiments. This paper presents a surface complexation model (SCM) for the interaction between glycine and oil-wet carbonate surfaces that considers the impact of temperature, pH, salinity, and the concentrations of PDIs. The proposed SCM was tuned based on the zeta potential (ZP) data reported for synthetic calcite in glycine solutions. The tuned model predicts that the strong affinity of glycine for the oil-wet carbonate surface causes the carboxylic acids to desorb from the surface. The concentration of adsorbed carboxylic acids was in qualitative agreement with the water-wetting state of carbonate rocks inferred from the reported contact angle and spontaneous imbibition experiments. Moreover, the model indicates that glycine’s performance as a wettability alteration agent improves significantly at high temperatures. It also suggests that enhanced oil recovery (EOR) by formation brine (FB) with 1 to 3 wt% glycine at high temperatures should be similar to the injection of low-salinity seawater (LSW). The proposed SCM supports glycine’s potential to change the wettability of oil-wet carbonates at high salinity, high hardness, and high temperature.