Zeta Potential and Its Impact for Enhancing Oil Recovery in Sandstone and Carbonate Reservoirs: A Review

Enormous worldwide energy demand and increasing the need for more oil recovery with high efficiency are one of the factors driving more interest in enhanced oil recovery mechanisms for extracting more oil from reservoirs.Through the past decades a rapid development of enhanced oil recovery mechanisms, among that the effect of zeta potential has become very interesting topic because it has a significant importance on wettability alteration and then oil recovery.Several studies have been used zeta potential measurements to interpret wettability alteration in EOR processes by modification the charges on rock surface as a response when it exposes to different injected brines.Zeta potential () is an important parameter which required to measure the electrical potential (positive, negative, or neutral charge) on rock minerals or colloidal surface when it expose to an electrolyte.It dominants the electrostatic interactions between rock surface and polar groups in the brines.The electrical charges of the rock-brine and oil-brine interfaces can modify by controlling the salinity of injection water.Therefore, it can be used for choosing and designing the optimum composition of the water (brine) injection in carbonate and sandstone reservoirs, which leads to increase the oil recovery.In this paper, an integrated literature review is conducted to summarize the definition, methods of measurement, behaviour and characterization of zeta potential mechanism and its impact on oil-water and rock -water interface that should be considered in designing the injection brine project.