As the production of hydrocarbons from the carbonate reservoir increases, there is a necessity to enhance oil recovery methods to increase recovery factors and improve the economic efficiency of field development. The knowledge of wettability's role and fluid distribution at the pore scale is required to comprehend the mechanisms for oil displacement from porous media. The X-ray computed micro-CT technology provides opportunities to study the complex fluid displacement process at the pore level. This work discusses wettability restoration in carbonate cores and its effect on fluid distribution in porous space. Wettability restoration refers to restoring the original wettability of the core after extraction. We investigate wettability change and two-phase fluid distribution at pore-scale with the help of micro-CT technique along with Amott spontaneous imbibition methods. The Amott spontaneous imbibition experiments performed on the core under ambient pressure. The micro-CT experiments conducted for steady flow core flooding experiments on harsh cleaned cores. The three-dimensional images acquired for dry core, core saturated with brine and kerosene followed by oil injection. For better visualization of the fluid-fluid and fluid-rock surface and to remove voxel artifacts, iodo-octane is mixed with oil with 10 % wt/wt. The experiments allow us to envisage the structures of fluid in each phase during the displacement of fluid in carbonate rocks with high resolution (3 μm/voxel). The novelty of this approach lies in efficiently capturing the CT images of the fluid distribution and its influence on wettability during the "core-aging" procedure and validating the results of it with the Amott imbibition wettability index. The initial wettability of harsh cleaned carbonate cores was identified as water-wet compare to mixed wettability for mild cleaned carbonates. Nevertheless, all the samples become strongly oil-wet regardless of the cleaning methods after long-term saturation with crude oil. The X-ray CT technique revealed the fast evolution of contact angle of brine corresponding the wettability changes to strong oil-wet after contact with crude oil under the reservoir conditions.
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