Imbibition Capillary Pressure and Relative Permeability of Mixed-Wet Microporous Rock: New Insights from History Matching

TY - JOUR

T1 - Imbibition Capillary Pressure and Relative Permeability of Mixed-Wet Microporous Rock

T2 - New Insights from History Matching

AU - Tanino, Yukie

AU - Christensen, Magali

N1 - MC was supported by the University of Aberdeen College of Physical Sciences studentship. The authors gratefully acknowledge CYDAREX for providing an evaluation license for their software CYDARTM , Koon-Yang Lee for the n-decane/brine static contact angle measurements on calcite (Supplementary Material S3), and Steffen Berg for his insightful comments and suggestions as a reviewer for conference paper Christensen and Tanino 2018 on which this paper builds. Finally, the authors thank the three anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments. All data used in this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. In addition, the centrifuge data generated during this study are included as a Excel spreadsheet in the supplementary materials for this published article. One set of mercury injection capillary pressure measurements by Tanino and Blunt (2012) analysed in Text S2 are available in the Mendeley data repository, https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/9f4898jfr9/1.

PY - 2019/8

Y1 - 2019/8

N2 - We use a Darcy-scale simulator to extract residual oil saturation, forcedimbibition capillary pressure, and relative permeability by history matching tomeasured pressure drop and cumulative oil production during multi-speed centrifuge experiments and constant-rate waterfloods in Indiana limestone cores under four different wettability states established by adding different naphthenic acids to the oil phase. Residual oil saturation decreases monotonically as advancing bulk contact angle increases from θa = 110◦ to 150◦, in sharp contrast to the nonmonotonic dependence displayed by the core-averaged oil saturation which are often mis-interpreted to be representative of true residual saturation. The magnitude of the capillary pressure required to establish a particular water saturation increases with θa. Saturation-normalized water relative permeability exceeds one at θa ≥ 125◦ , with equivalent slip lengths of up to O(200) nm. The simulations indicate that capillary end effects may be significant during displacement experiments under typical laboratory conditions, even in mixed-wet media of relatively low permeability, and highlight the importance of using numerical simulation to interpret displacement experiments under capillary-dominated conditions.

AB - We use a Darcy-scale simulator to extract residual oil saturation, forcedimbibition capillary pressure, and relative permeability by history matching tomeasured pressure drop and cumulative oil production during multi-speed centrifuge experiments and constant-rate waterfloods in Indiana limestone cores under four different wettability states established by adding different naphthenic acids to the oil phase. Residual oil saturation decreases monotonically as advancing bulk contact angle increases from θa = 110◦ to 150◦, in sharp contrast to the nonmonotonic dependence displayed by the core-averaged oil saturation which are often mis-interpreted to be representative of true residual saturation. The magnitude of the capillary pressure required to establish a particular water saturation increases with θa. Saturation-normalized water relative permeability exceeds one at θa ≥ 125◦ , with equivalent slip lengths of up to O(200) nm. The simulations indicate that capillary end effects may be significant during displacement experiments under typical laboratory conditions, even in mixed-wet media of relatively low permeability, and highlight the importance of using numerical simulation to interpret displacement experiments under capillary-dominated conditions.

KW - capillary trapping

KW - multiphase flow

KW - slippage

KW - residual saturation

KW - history matching

KW - Slippage

KW - 2-PHASE FLOW

KW - Multiphase flow

KW - WETTABILITY

KW - CONTACT-ANGLE

KW - OIL-WET

KW - Residual saturation

KW - RECOVERY

KW - History matching

KW - PRUDHOE BAY

KW - SURFACE

KW - POROUS-MEDIA

KW - SATURATION

KW - Capillary trapping

UR - http://www.mendeley.com/research/imbibition-capillary-pressure-relative-permeability-mixedwet-microporous-rock-new-insights-history-m

UR - https://abdn.pure.elsevier.com/en/en/researchoutput/imbibition-capillary-pressure-and-relative-permeability-of-mixedwet-microporous-rock(1f3e8ab8-4e73-4191-8de4-a1a04e68f45c).html

U2 - 10.1007/s11242-019-01280-4

DO - 10.1007/s11242-019-01280-4

M3 - Article

VL - 129

SP - 121

EP - 148

JO - Transport in Porous Media

JF - Transport in Porous Media

SN - 0169-3913

IS - 1

ER -