Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 52 (2006) 297 304

www.elsevier.com/locate/petrol

Experimental investigation of oil recovery

during water imbibition
H. Karimaie a,, O. Torster b , M.R. Esfahani b ,
M. Dadashpour a , S.M. Hashemi b
a

Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)-TrondheimNorway

b
Research Institute of Petroleum of Iran(RIPI), Iran
Received 21 June 2005; accepted 7 March 2006

Abstract
Capillary imbibition and gravity are the main forces acting in fractured reservoirs. The cores used in the laboratory are usually short
while experimental investigation of the gravity forces requires long samples. Therefore an experimental study has been carried out on
a long core with the length of 116 cm surrounded with a simulated fracture. Kerosene and a synthetic oil with a density very close to
brine have been chosen in order to distinguish the capillary and gravity effects during the water oil displacement. After doing many
carefully conducted tests at different rates, it is clear that the process is significantly influenced by gravity. The second part of the study
involved experiments on the long core surrounded with a simulated fracture where the flow processes are dominated by either cocurrent or counter-current imbibition. We changed the recovery mechanism from co-current to counter-current by changing the
boundary conditions from an advancing fracture water level to an immersion-type mechanism. Our co-current and counter-current
experiments on a tall block showed that counter-current imbibition has lower recovery than co-current imbibition. A wettability study
was done after cutting the core into many pieces and aging the pieces in crude oil. Different wettability states were obtained by
applying different aging times. The cores with different wettability index were subjected to immersion-type experiment. The results
showed that more water wet conditions gave higher oil recovery.
2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Imbibition; Co-current; Counter-current; Inverse bond number; Wettability

1. Introduction
Water injection is one of the most important methods
for oil recovery from fractured reservoirs. In water-wet
fractured reservoirs, the capillary pressure contrast
between the fracture and the matrix media provides the
main driving force for water imbibition (Oen et al.,
1988). Flow between matrix blocks and the fractures is
Corresponding author. Tel.: +47 73 59 71 40; fax: +47 73 94 44 72.
E-mail address: hassank@ipt.ntnu.no (H. Karimaie).
0920-4105/$ - see front matter 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.petrol.2006.03.024

controlled mainly by the capillary imbibition and the

gravity forces though other forces such as expansion,
diffusion and viscous forces may also influence the
recovery process depending upon the pressure, temperature and the composition of the fluids involved in the
process. For oilwater system, the influence of diffusion
may be neglected and if the water displacement takes
place at constant pressure above bubble point pressure,
the role of expansion can also be neglected. In the case of
an oilwater system, the capillary pressure is positive
and the primary recovery mechanism for a strongly water

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H. Karimaie et al. / Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 52 (2006) 297304

wet rock is the capillary imbibition. The common belief

is that capillary imbibition is the most effective for small
block sizes and its potential reduces with increasing
block sizes (Pratap et al., 1997). If the density difference
between oil and water is appreciable, then gravity segregation may play a dominant role. Kyte (1970) studied
the effects of both capillarity and gravity and used scaling laws for the process of oil recovery from matrix
blocks by water displacement. His study was based on
experiments on small cores by use of the centrifuge. Iffly
et al. (1972) performed some experiments on cores
varying in length between 5 and 191 cm (by simulation)
and permeability varying between 10 and 1000 md and
introduced the concept of Capillary Gravity Ratio
(CGR). The variation of CGR was between 20 and
1000. The results showed that CGR directly influences
recovery, independent of other experimental conditions.
The final conclusion was that recovery is more rapid and
more significant if CGR is smaller, which shows the role
of increased gravitational forces in reducing the time of
recovery. Similar experiments have been carried out by
Lefebure du Prey (1978) on parallelepipeds with only
one lateral face open for imbibition. He concludes that
smaller CGR or increased gravitational forces are
associated with a faster recovery. Schechter et al.
(1994) introduced the inverse Bond number, NB 1 as
expressed in the following form:

NB1

p
r /=k
C
DqgH

Here C = 0.4 for the capillary tube model, and H is the

height of the medium. They showed that for a system
with well-defined wetting properties, capillary forces are
dominant for NB 1 N 5 and gravity forces for NB 1 1. In
the intermediate range, 0.2 b NB 1 b 5, both capillary and
gravity forces can be active in the displacement. If
capillary forces dominate the spontaneous process, i.e.
NB 1 N 5, the oil is produced in a counter-current flow
mode from all surfaces. The oil will be produced mainly
from the upper part of the porous medium when NB 1 is in
the intermediate range, 0.2 b NB 1 b 5. Both capillary and
gravity forces are assumed to be active in the
displacement process. In this case, the gravity contribution is high and will cause considerable segregation of
the flow, which keeps relative permeabilities high, and
capillary forces are still strong enough to boost the
driving force for flow (Schechter et al., 1994). In other
words, as NB 1 is reduced by decreasing IFT or increasing
the density difference, gravity forces become more im-

portant. In the limit of very low NB 1 values, the flow is

completely segregated by gravity. In this case, the
relative permeabilities of both phases are higher because
flow is segregated and co-current; also resistance to flow
is lower. In this study both capillary dominated and
capillary-gravity dominated flow have been investigated
in a long core by reducing the density difference which
causes a change of the inverse Bond number by one order
of magnitude.
Therefore, imbibition in fractured reservoirs involves
both co-current and counter-current flows in proportions
that depend on the ratio of the gravity to capillary and on
the conditions applied at the boundaries of the matrix
block. From the previous studies, it is clear that recovery
behavior for a block which is in contact with water from
some faces and oil from other faces, is different from the
same block totally covered by water. However, most of
the studies have been done on the counter-current type
experiment. When the block is partially covered by
water, oil can flow downstream of the water front and
also through the faces which are in contact with oil. In the
latter case oil flow will be in a single-phase region (cocurrent mechanism) that is more efficient than in the case
where oil is flowing through the two-phase region
(counter-current mechanism). Oil and water will flow in
the same direction in a co-current process while the flow
of oil and water is in the opposite directions in a countercurrent process. Bourbiaux and Kaladjian (1990)
performed experiments on a laterally coated single
block with different boundary conditions and found that
final oil recovery is slightly greater in co-current flow
than in counter-current flow. They showed that cocurrent relative permeabilities are much higher than
counter-current values. Numerical studies by PooladiDarvish and Firoozabadi (2000a) showed that recovery
by co-current flow was four to eight times faster than that
by counter-current imbibition.
In a fractured reservoir subjected to water injection,
the fracture network does not become flooded all at once;
the fracture-water level has an advancing behavior
(Pooladi-Darvish and Firoozabadi, 2000b). Some studies have been performed on the recovery performance of
a matrix block under advancing fracture water level
(Parsons and Chaney, 1966; Kleppe and Morse, 1974).
Almost all of these studies were performed for very
strongly water wet conditions (Graham and Richardson,
1959; Parsons and Chaney, 1966; Viksund et al., 1998).
In many reservoirs it is observed that the wettability may
change from water-wet low in the structure near the oil/
water contact to mixed-wet or even oil-wet behavior
higher on structure. This indicates that many possible
wetting states can exist in a fractured reservoir.

H. Karimaie et al. / Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 52 (2006) 297304

However, wettability depends on many variables such

as composition of the rock and fluids, temperature and
pressure. Hence wettability studies show that all reservoir
rocks are not strongly wet by water in the presence of
crude oil. In such cases recovery due to imbibition may be
low. Control of oil/brine wetting by adsorption of known
chemicals has been used in studies of contact angle,
relative permeability and oil recovery. A recent example is
the use of hexadecylamine in imbibition studies (Kowalewski et al., 2000). Salathiel (1973) studied the wettability alteration by crude oil while the porous medium
contained initial water saturation. From a series of experiments, he concluded that those parts of a rock surface
overlain by connate water were protected from adsorption. This kind of wetting condition is called mixed and
is now the most widely accepted model for reservoir
wettability. Adsorption of heavy polar components from
crude oil does not usually induce a strongly oil-wet state.
The combined effects of variation in the composition,
amount, and distribution of initial water saturation and the
extent of wettability change resulting from adsorption
leads to a broad variety of wetting conditions (Zhou et al.,
2000). Variation of aging time provides one method of
obtaining systematic changes in wettability while holding other variables constant. In some studies the crude
oil is displaced by injecting a solvent, which in turn is
displaced by refined oil. Through this procedure, the
excess crude oil is removed without incurring precipitation of asphaltenes. An adsorbed film of heavy polar
components still remains on the rock surface where it
had been exposed to the crude oil during aging (Morrow
et al., 1986; Graue et al., 1999). The aging time should
be sufficient to reach the adsorption equilibrium. There
is always uncertainty as to whether this is achieved.
Normally aging times are in the range of 16 weeks. The
Amott test is often used for evaluation of oil recovery by
spontaneous imbibition from fractured reservoirs
(Amott, 1959). The test is based on the fact that some
of the oil is produced under spontaneous imbibition
while the core initially is at connate water saturation.
Some additional oil can be recovered by forced imbibition either by centrifuging or by waterflooding. A
wettability index to water, Iw, is defined as the ratio of
the spontaneous increase in water saturation to the total
increase. After reaching the residual oil saturation by
forced displacement, the core is tested for spontaneous
uptake of oil followed by measurement of additional oil
recovery by forced displacement. The ratio of spontaneously uptake of oil to the total oil displaced gives a
wettability index to oil, Io. For a water-wet system Iw is
positive and Io is zero. Similarly for an oil-wet system Io is
positive and Iw is zero. For the purpose of classification

299

discussion, the wettability index ranging from +1 to 1

was subdivided as follows: water-wet (+1 to +0.3), slightly water-wet (+0.3 to +0.1), neutral or mixed-wet (0.1 to
+0.1), slightly oil-wet (0.1 to 0.3), and oil-wet (0.3 to
1) (Cuiec, 1984).
Imbibition curves for mixed-wet samples show
considerable variation in shapes. During the period
which is called induction time, very little or no imbibition is observed. This phenomena is not completely
understood but is probably related to the time required
for water paths to be established and/or for very slow
changes towards water wetness that result from
exposing the sample to brine (Zhou et al., 2000). In
mixed-wet system, imbibition rate and final oil recovery
generally decrease with increasing aging time and aging
temperature. The behavior of mixed-wet core plugs is
also very sensitive to initial water saturation (Xie and
Morrow, 2000).
We studied the recovery performance of a matrix
block under the condition that water is rising in a
fracture and during total immersion of the matrix block.
Water-wet long core and mixed-wet short cores were
studied. The dominant recovery mechanism is changed
from co-current to counter-current when the boundary
condition changed from a rising water-level to immersion-type experiment.
The main objectives of this work are:
To understand the effect of capillary and gravity
during water displacement in a fractured system by
using an experimental arrangement.
To compare the co-current and counter-current
imbibitions in water-wet media and

Fig. 1. Schematic of apparatus for saturating and cleaning.

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H. Karimaie et al. / Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 52 (2006) 297304

Fig. 3. Schematic of apparatus for the immersion test.

Fig. 2. Schematic of apparatus for the imbibition test.

to investigate the effect of wettability on water injection in water-wet and mixed-wet fractured media.
2. Operational procedure
A Bentheimer core, 116 cm in length and 1.5 in. in
diameter, was fired at 500 C for 72 h to remove the
effects of clay swelling and migration during the imbibition process. The saturation procedure was the same
for all runs. Fig. 1 shows a schematic diagram of the
apparatus used for saturating and cleaning the long core.
It simply consists of a core holder, with a sleeve with the
length of 1.3 m, fluid lines and accumulators. Initially the
core was placed in a plexi-glass cylinder, evacuated and
saturated with brine (deaerated solution of 1 wt.% NaCl
in distilled water). Absolute permeability to brine was

Table 1
Properties of the long core and fluid system
Permeability (md)
Porosity (%)
Diameter of the core (cm)
Inside diameter of the tube (cm)
Length of the core (cm)
Density of kerosene (g/cm3)
Density of brine (g/cm3)
Viscosity of kerosene (c.p)
Viscosity of brine (c.p)
Density of heavy oil (g/cm3)
Viscosity of heavy oil (c.p)
Pore volume of core (cm3)
IFT for kerosenebrine (mN/m)
IFT for heavy oilbrine (mN/m)

1397
22.5
3.81
4.20
116.4
0.78
1.005
1.33
1.0013
0.973
1.71
280.27
40.47
48.38

determined. The core was then flooded with oil in order

to reach to initial water saturation. Establishing the initial
water was a time consuming step, where water was
displaced by oil at a low constant pressure (around
70 KPa). Initial water saturation was more or less
constant for all tests, between 35% and 37%. The direction of oil injection was reversed several times after
breakthrough to make the saturation profile more uniform. After establishing the initial water saturation,
experiments were started by putting the core into a long
plexi-glass cylinder. Fig. 2 shows the setup that is used
for the imbibition experiments. The annular space
between the core and the plexi-glass tube is initially
filled with oil. Screws were used in order to centralize the
long core and spacers were used at the bottom to ensure
complete coverage of the core; the system simulated the
fracture system. Table 1 gives the properties of the
laboratory system.
Each test started by injection of the brine solution
using a constant rate pump. Brine was injected into the
lower end of the tube. The outlet of the plexi-glass tube
was open to atmosphere, providing a constant pressure
production. As the experiment was running, the fracture
water level (FWL) rose to the top of the tube. During the
constant rate flow experiments, collected amount of
wetting (brine) and non-wetting (kerosene) phases and
Table 2
Results for long core experiment NB 1 = 2.6
Injection rate
(cc/min)

FWL speed
(cm/min)

Final rec.
(%) OOIP

Rec. % after
18(hr)

Total
rec. (%)

0.1
0.5
1.0
5.0
Immersion

0.02
0.145
0.28
1.51

62.5
56.2
52.4
36.6
44.0

2.5
4.2
5.1
15

65
60.4
57.5
51.6
44.0

H. Karimaie et al. / Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 52 (2006) 297304

301

method and dried in an oven at a temperature of 80 C

for 48 h. After initial preparation and evaluation of
petrophysical properties, the following steps were used
to restore the samples to reservoir conditions:

Fig. 4. Recovery for the rising water-level experiments.

the FWL in the annular space were recorded as a

function of time. Brine injection was continued until no
oil production was recorded. The injection was stopped
to ensure equilibrium saturation of the core and started
again after 18 h to measure the remaining oil produced,
if any. After each run the long core was placed in the
core holder and flushed with methanol and toluene in
order to clean it. The core was placed into the oven and
prepared for the next run.
In the counter-current experiment, the core at initial
water saturation was placed in the plexi-glass tube with
spacers at the bottom and screws around it to ensure
complete coverage and centralization of the core. The
core holder was connected to a graduated cylinder
through a pipe with a large diameter (see Fig. 3) to allow
the flow of produced oil blobs from the top of the core
holder to the graduated cylinder. Oil recovery was
measured by monitoring the oilwater interface in the
graduated cylinder.
In order to investigate the effect of wettability on
water displacement, the long core was cut into 20 pieces.
The samples were cleaned by a distillation/extraction

Fig. 5. Recovery curve for the immersion experiment.

The plugs were saturated with brine.

The samples were placed in a centrifuge and rotated
at a constant speed (RPM) under crude oil, in order to
reach the initial water saturation.
All samples were submerged in oil and allowed to
age at 60 C; and
the samples were divided into 3 groups and in order
to reach to various wettability conditions some of
them were taken out after 15 d of aging, some of
them after 30 d, and the rest of them after 40 d.
3. Results and discussion
3.1. Displacement in the fracture system
A kerosenebrine system was used for the first part of
the displacement experiment. The density difference was
equal to 0.22 g/cm3 and NB 1 was equal to 2.6. Therefore
the process was capillary-gravity dominated. The water
injection rate in the displacement experiments was
changed from one run to the next. Four injection rates
were chosen for the experiments; 0.1, 0.5, 1 and 5 cm3/
min. The speed of water rising in the fracture increases
when injection rate is increased. Oil production started
from the top of the column while water started to rise in
the fractures. The average fracture water level (FWL)
velocities are 0.0205, 0.145, 0.28 and 1.51 cm/min for
the four rates respectively. The results of oil recovery at
different injection rates are shown in Table 2 and Fig. 4.
The experiments show an increasing recovery with
decreasing injection rate. In the low injection rate case,
water has enough time to enter the matrix and recover the

Fig. 6. Recovery curve for the water injection experiment.

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H. Karimaie et al. / Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 52 (2006) 297304

Table 3
Results for long core experiment
Injection rate
(cc/min)

FWL speed
(cm/min)

Final rec.
(%) OOIP

Rec. (%)
after 18(hr)

Total
rec.(%)

0.5
1.0
5.0
Immersion

0.13
0.31
1.57

43.72
36.32
21.47
28.26

5.7
6.1
15.1

49.42
42.42
36.57
28.26

NB 1 = 31.8.

oil; this leads to co-current imbibition. Slower rates

allow the water to contact the matrix for a longer time
resulting in stronger capillary imbibition. The higher
injection rate resulted in a higher velocity of the fracture
water level and less time for oil production from the
block before it was immersed in water. With increasing
injection rate, water breakthrough occurs earlier, and the
portion of oil that is recovered by counter-current
imbibition increases. Moreover, more oil blobs were
observed below the fracture water level indicating more
counter-current production. In addition, the amount of
oil that was produced after the 18 h shut-in period at the
end of the experiment (when the core is completely
immersed) shows that after the low injection rate case
less oil is recovered. When the injection rate approaches
infinity a situation similar to an immersion type test
recovery is dominated by counter-current imbibition and
this is slower than oil recovery by co-current imbibition.
In the immersion-type experiment the block was immersed in the brine. Imbibition occurred more slowly
over several days. Oil was expelled from all the surfaces
while water was imbibed. Some oil blobs on the rock
surfaces could be seen easily and they become
disconnected from the surfaces after a period of time.
The initial recovery rate for the immersion-type experiment was high due to the large contact area between the
matrix and the water in the fracture. However the
immersion-type experiment requires more time to reach

the ultimate recovery as shown in Fig. 5. Immersion-type

experiments resulted in much lower recovery and take
more time compared to the rising water-level-type of
experiment (see Fig. 6). The change in boundary
conditions is the main reason. The nature of the boundary
condition that is applied in the immersion test leads to
counter-current imbibition while rising water in the
fracture leads to predominantly co-current flow.
In the next part of the experiment, to investigate how
oil recovery changes with density difference, experiments were performed by using a synthetic oil (Tetralin)
with the density equal to 0.973 g/cm3 that is very close to
the brine density. In other words, we changed the inverse
Bond number from 2.6 to 31.8 in order to change the
flow mode. Therefore the process is capillary dominated.
Results are shown in Table 3 and Fig. 7. These results are
in line with the first set of tests and confirm that with
decreasing injection rate, oil recovery increases. Some
oil blobs were observed to exit from both lateral and end
faces of the core. The final recovery was lower than for
the low NB 1 experiment. In the low NB 1 experiment,
nearly 56% of oil was recovered, but the recovery
decreased to around 44% at high NB 1 (in the case of
q = 0.5 cm3/min, e.g.). The recovery is decreased more
than 20% depending on the injection rate. It is clear that

Fig. 7. Water injection experiments using heavy oil.

Fig. 9. Effect of gravity on recovery (q = 1 cc/min).

Fig. 8. Effect of gravity on recovery (q = 0.5 cc/min).

H. Karimaie et al. / Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 52 (2006) 297304

Fig. 10. Effect of gravity on recovery (q = 5 cc/min).

displacement at low NB 1 were much more efficient than

those at high NB 1. Figs. 810 show how recovery
changed as the relative importance of capillary and
gravity forces changes.
Due to small density differences between the heavy
oil and the brine, oil was not able to come up into the
graduated cylinder in the immersion-type experiment.
Oil that was expelled out of the core stayed in the
fracture. Therefore, we were not able to record the
production data versus time and only the final recovery
was determined after 1 week which was 28.26%. This
was lower than the case with kerosene (44%).
3.2. Wettability experiments
Different aging times were chosen in order to reach to
different wettability conditions. The centrifuge was used
to establish the initial water into the cores. The cores
were saturated with the wetting phase (brine) and rotated
in the crude oil with the density of 0.86 gr/cc at high
speed (6000 RPM). The initial water saturation was the
same for all the cores between 12% and 12.5%. The
plugs were submerged in oil and placed into the oven at

Fig. 11. Variation of lw with aging time.

303

Fig. 12. Recovery at different wettability conditions (immersion-type

experiment).

60 C for aging. Different aging times (15, 30, 40 d) were

selected in order to reach to different wettability states.
Wettability of the samples was measured by using the
Amott-method. Fig. 11 shows the wettability index to
water for different aging times. It is clear that the water
wettability index is decreasing due to increasing aging
time and different wettability states have been achieved.
All cores had the same dimension, 1.5 in. in diameter and
5 cm in length. The experimental procedure was similar
to the long core immersion-type experiment. In this
study the crude oil was displaced by toluene which is in
turn displaced by flushing with normal decane. Through
this procedure, the excess crude oil was removed without
removing the precipitated asphaltenes. An adsorbed film
of heavy polar components still remains on the rock
surface that was exposed to crude oil during aging
(Morrow et al., 1986; Graue et al., 1999). The samples
with different Iw were subjected to immersion-type
experiment. Results are shown in Fig. 12. It is clear that
more water-wet conditions gave higher oil recovery.
4. Conclusion
The experimental study in this paper reveals that oil
recovery due to water injection in preferentially waterwet core surrounded by a fracture is highly influenced by
gravity. Also both mechanisms of co-current and
counter-current flows can occur during the water
injection depending on the injection rate. This means
that the rate of injection can be a determining factor for
the oil recovery during waterflooding of a fractured
reservoir. Despite more contact area in counter-current
imbibition, co-current flow is more efficient than
counter-current flow. Wettability can also have a
significant effect on recovery. The final oil recovery
increases with the increase in the wettability index for
immersion-type experiment.

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H. Karimaie et al. / Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 52 (2006) 297304

Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the financial support provided by
the National Iranian Oil Company and Statoil.
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