Kaolinite fines colloidal flow in high temperature porous carbonate media during saline water injection

Kaolinite clay fines are prevalent in sandstone porous media and it has great impacts on permeability and well productivity decline. High temperature sandstone formations detach the fines from the pore surface and migrate along with the permeating fluid. At some point the fine particles are strained in the pore throats, which leading to permeability damage and well productivity decline. To the best of our knowledge this phenomenon is not well explored in the high temperature carbonate media. Since most of the world's oil reserves are held in carbonate media and its worth to explore the formation damage, especially due to fines migration during higher reservoir temperature at these formations composed of carbonate minerals. Hence, this paper presents laboratory modeling of kaolinite fines colloidal flow in high temperature porous carbonate media during saline water injection. In this paper, we have conducted three sets of coreflood experiments in the temperature ranges of 100 °C 150 °C, and 200 °C. Kaolinite suspension water has been injected into the porous limestone core at these temperature regimes to investigate the possibility of permeability and injectivity deterioration. The main experimental results showed there is an increase in water saturation and heat transfer rates. Concentration of fines surges with increasing PVI and permeability declines with increasing time. Pressure elevates with enhancing PVI, but it plummets after some time. Significantly, the water discharge rate declines for increasing suspension injection and on the other side, for fresh water injection, the rate of water discharge rises steadily. Furthermore, the electrical and thermal conductivities of effluent kaolinite colloid were higher. Moreover, experimental model were tested against statistical based optimizational model, response surface methodology (RSM). These results revealed good agreement and, hence, this paper has explicated the importance of kaolinite clay fines suspension transport in high temperature carbonate reservoirs.