During the production life of an oil reservoir, the water cut may increase by a high percentage. Most of the produced water is re-injected back into the reservoir because of the treatment cost and as an environmental protection solution, especially in onshore fields. However, re-injection of produced oily water can cause formation damage. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, there-injection of produced water, which contains oil droplets and solid particles, is practiced in several on-and offshore fields and is often accompanied by injectivity decline and causes some formation damage due to pore throat plugging near the wellbore. The procedure of water disposal becomes an important issue, especially in remote areas, where the treatment facilities are very limited. To minimize the formation damage whilst injecting, the produced oily water should be treated to minimize the oil droplets as well as the solid particles content. In this article, water treatment options are presented, which maintain the injectivity and minimize environmental pollution. New materials were tested for their efficiency in removing the free and the soluble oil from produced water. Moreover, flooding experiments were conducted to determine the injectivity of the produced water before and after the treatment. Results showed clearly the ability of this material to obtain high quality water for re-injection or disposal.
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