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Low-salinity waterflooding (LSWF) is a promising EOR approach that decreases the oil-wetness of reservoir rocks, hence increasing the recovery factor. Despite the importance of the pore-geometry on the performance of LSWF, especially in 3D simulations being affected by corner-flow and roughness, it is not yet investigated, thus in this thesis we aim at studying the aforementioned effects on LSWF. According to the preceding studies, during the drainage phase, the brines in the corners of pores cannot be displaced by oil because of requiring very high capillary pressure; thereby rendering a mixed-wet system. Hence considering this type of wettability is necessary for two-phase flow... 

Considering the world's diminishing oil reserves, as well as the growing demand for oil and energy consumption, Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques are becoming increasingly important in the attempt to improve oil production. Engineering salinity waterflooding has gained widespread attention and popularity in the last two decades due to its environmental friendliness, lack of expensive additives, low operating costs, and ease of use as an oil extraction process. The goal of this study is to use an innovative method to develop a mechanistic approach model that simulates and forecasts the mechanism and performance of the engineered water flooding process. Wettability alteration, the most... 

Due to environmental concerns about fossil fuels energy sources, countries are striving to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. However, most alternative energy sources are highly dependent on weather and seasonal conditions. Underground hydrogen storage (UHS), unlike carbon dioxide storage which only experiences the gas injection phase, involves injection and production cycles. Therefore, it faces different challenges, each of which has different effects on the final hydrogen recovery rate and, consequently, cost estimation. Some of the major challenges ahead include the reservoir structure, heterogeneity of reservoirs, selection of suitable cushion gas, the impact of the... 

Mass or large-scale storage of hydrogen, as a clean source of energy, should be conducted in underground formations in order to be used as a reliable energy source at the peak of consumption. In this regard, underground formations such as aquifers and depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs are the most favorable and secured media for hydrogen storage. However, detailed understanding of the flow dynamics of hydrogen-water in these media is critical to maximize hydrogen storage and recovery and tackle the existing uncertainities which exist in the flow functions. To fill this gap, this research aims at a detailed pore-scale investigation of the effect of flow regime, hydrogen compressibility, and... 

Hydrogen storage in porous subsurface formations, such as aquifers or depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs because of their high storage capacity, has gained momentum as a promising approach to balance the renewable energy supply and demand. However, the poor understanding of hydrogen flow dynamics in porous media is the main obstacle to the development and widespread application of underground hydrogen storage (UHS). For example, the main uncertainty is lack of detailed understanding of hydrogen flow dynamics in the natural porous media which leads to the unknown volume of recoverable hydrogen for this cyclic process. In this research, by developing a visual microfluidic apparatus to handle... 

Low salinity water flooding (LSWF) is one of the enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods that can be applied in both secondary and tertiary recovery techniques. Some reports indicate no incremental oil recovery associated with this method, and the reason can be associated with the binary and tertiary interactions between oil-brine-rock (OBR) systems. In some OBRs, the initial conditions are not favourable in terms of initial wettability. One of the key factors is the local rock heterogeneities in permeability and mineralogy which can affect LSWF performance because the microscopic and macroscopic heterogeneities can impact the flow pattern of the injected water, oil displacement efficiency, and... 

Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques have become of the main priorities of the oil industry during the high oil price era. It is interesting to note that the common method to increase production from reservoirs is the water injection method, which recovers a very low amount of oil from the oil-wet matrices due to the lack of water imbibition. Previous studies have shown that changing the wettability of rock would critically increase the oil recovery efficiency. This could be achieved by the low-salinity water injection method. In recent years, extensive studies have been conducted on this technique to evaluate its effectiveness for various types of oil reservoirs. Simultaneous injection... 

Various methods have been developed to improve the production capacity of hydrocarbon wells, one of the most successful method is hydraulic fracture. This method, despite improving well production and increasing production levels in a reservoir, causes secondary damages such as water blockage, which is a result of the leakage of fracturing fluid into the fracture matrix and the deformation of the reservoir. This damage can reduce the production rate of a well. Studies prior to this study have mainly examined the damages caused by the leakage of fracturing fluids on a core scale. In most of these studies, damages has been studied only by measuring the pressure and changes in the permeability... 

Water injection, as one of the conventional methods to increase the oil recovery factor has always been at the center of research works for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). The conducted studies show that by controlling the amount and type of ions in the injected water, the recovery efficiency can be improved. In the meantime, most of the investigations are focused on the interaction between water/rock/oil to trace the wettability alteration. However, these interactions especially between the injected water and the oil phase, would lead to change of surface charge distribution of the reservoir rock. Besides, this effect can change some of the characteristics of the fluid phases, especially in... 

Various studies have confirmed that water salinity and its composition significantly affect the efficiency of the waterflooding process. Field-scale operation of low-salinity water injection has been proven to be a cost-effective enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method which is also compatible with the environmental regulations. Although this method has satisfactory results, it faces some challenges, such as in-situ mixing of the injection low-salinity water with the saline water in the host reservoir. The salinity of the injected water increases, as it contacts the high-salinity reservoir brine in the pores. This phenomenon significantly impairs the efficiency of this technique, and increases... 

The Low salinity water flooding is one of the important methods of secondary and tertiary oil production in which many expert petroleum-production engineering working on it in recent two decades. There are some basis mechanisms for low salinity method presented in the literatures including fine migrations, alkaline flooding, multicomponent ionic exchange, electrical double-layer expansion and pH-driven wettability alteration. The main approach is generating low salinity mechanism especially wettability alteration in OpenPNM framework. OpenPNM is a python base framework developed by Jeff Gostick for porous media modeling. OpenPNM has paved the way for extracting pore network models (PNM) from... 

Due to the decrease in oil reserves in the world, increasing population and the growing demands for oil consumption in the world, increasing the oil recovery from oil reservoirs has become more important. Increasing the amount of oil production efficiency by using low salinity water/modified salinity water has been highly appreciated during the last two decades. Low-salt water is a new method, due to its advantages such as low cost, simplicity of operation and low environmental hazards. It is believed that low salinity water can alter the rock wettability from a more oil-wetting state to a more water-wetting state. In order to be able to predict the performance of low salinity water... 

Considering the water tensions, especially in the Middle East, water resources for the implementation of water-based EOR methods are shown to be critically limited. Water sources such as industrial wastewater hold great potential to be used for this purpose due to their significant available volume and the need for their disposal because of environmental regulations. In this research, the potential of injecting industrial wastewater, as low-salinity water, in an Iranian carbonated oil reservoir has been thoroughly investigated by conducting core-scale experiments. In this regard, we also developed a guideline for designing various types of experiments to use this "unconventional" injection... 

Oil composition plays an undeniable role on the low salinity water flooding (LSWF) efficiency. This property directly affects the kinetics of wettability alteration through electrostatic interactions and interfacial tension (IFT). For instance, mixing in stagnant zones through a thin water film is considered as one of the most important diffusion controlled phenomenon which is goverened by Non-Fickian solute transport model. The major two potentials controlling the solute transport in thin film are salinity gradient and electrostatic potentials, which can be affected by oil composition and surface charges. This study aims to investigate the effect of oil composition on low salinity... 

During all operations in oil and gas reservoirs, it is possible to cause formation damage. These damages can greatly reduce the rate of production. One of the major damages that can seriously affect the performance of a reservoir is the damage caused by drilling fluid. The main purpose of this thesis is to study the main mechanisms of formation damage caused by water-based drilling fluid using a glass micromodel for the first time. An accurate understanding of the mechanisms of formation damage can provide a good understanding of the selection of the type and concentration of materials used, as well as appropriate methods to control and eliminate damages. for controlling the drilling fluid... 

Formation damage is one of the most important challneges in hydrocarbon production; drilling mud invasion is one of its common types. This damage is caused by the penetration of the drilling fluid into the porous media, which its filtrate and solid pareticles block the pores and cause permeability reduction. The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate the pore-scale mechanisms of the formation damage induced by invert-emulsion drilling fluid and to investigate the effect of adding nanoparticles to the drilling fluid on the severity of the damage using microfluidic technique. According to the latest published articles, there has not been any research conducted at the pore-scale with... 

Acidizing as the most frequent stimulation technique in the field, has been extensively used to increase the production rate. Even though acidizing treatments is well established, there is still an inherent risk for self-induced formation damage through incompatibilities of the fluids involved in this process.
A main potential problem during acidizing is the incompatibility of the acid and the reservoir’s crude oil. Acid interaction with crude oil can produce two major damage mechanisms that could offset partially, if not totally the benefit of the acid stimulation. These mechanisms are the rigid film emulsion formation and the acid-sludge precipitation, result in well productivity... 

Despite the proven advantage of the engineered water flooding technique, a coherent and mechanistic understanding of the fundamental phenomena occurring at pore scale is lacking. Most of the available simulation models have a phenomenological approach and have limited predictive capability. One of the key questions is how to justify and relate large (Darcy) scale observations to effects and phenomena that essentially occur at much smaller scales (i.e. pore and molecular level). Furthermore, two-phase flow dynamics and the effect of complex interplay between wettability, capillary number, and ions dispersion in a heterogeneous porous medium on the trapping and mobilization of oil at pore... 

Formation damage in petroleum engineering is an important and fundamental phenomenon. During drilling operation, penetration of either the solid phase of drilling fluid or the base-fluid into the porous medium, reduces the permeability of the formation. While most experiments in the literature have focused on core-scale and beyond, there is lack of pore-scale studies. Moreover, presence of fractures has an undeniable effect on the extent of formation damage. Thus, the main objective of this dissertation is to investigate the effects of fractures on the severity of formation damage caused by the water-based drilling fluid and the mechanisms of formation damage at the pore scale, using glass... 

Low salinity water flooding (LSWF) is a relatively new EOR method in which low salinity or modified ionic composition water is injected into the reservoir to alter its wettability toward a more water-wettable state to accelerate oil recovery. Ease of field deployment and relatively low cost, as well as laboratory results confirming the positive effect of this method in improving the oil recovery factor, have made this technique attractive in the oil industry.Despite the many advantages of this method, overcoming the mixing between low and high salinity water which occurs due to a high mobility ratio between these two fluids is essential because it negatively affects the efficiency of LSWF....