Monitoring Oil Displacement Processes with k-t Accelerated Spin Echo SPI

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a robust tool to monitor oil displacement processes in porous media. However, a lengthy measurement time can hinder monitoring the displacement. Knowledge of the oil and water micro distribution is important because their pore scale behavior reflects the oil trapping mechanisms.
In this work, a pure phase encoding MRI technique, Spin Echo SPI (SE-SPI), was employed to monitor oil displacement during water flooding and polymer flooding. A k-t acceleration method, with low rank matrix completion, was employed to improve the temporal resolution of SE-SPI MRI measurements. A fluorolube oil, with no 1H, and H2O brine were employed to distinguish oil and water phases. High quality 1D water saturation profiles were acquired from the k-t accelerated SE-SPI measurements. Spatially and temporally resolved T2 distributions were extracted from the profile data. Micro scale oil and water distribution in the pore space were correlated with the measured T2 distribution.