Directional Dependency of Relative Permeability in Vugular Porous Medium: Experiment and Numerical Simulation

Shihan Song, Yuan Di () and Wanjiang Guo
Additional contact information
Shihan Song: Department of Energy and Resources Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Yuan Di: Department of Energy and Resources Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Wanjiang Guo: School of Petroleum Engineering, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao 266580, China

Energies, 2023, vol. 16, issue 7, 1-23

Abstract: Carbonate reservoirs are a highly heterogeneous type of reservoir characterized by the presence of a large amount of vugs and pores. During two-phase displacement, the two-phase flow regime in the vugs might be gravity segregated. The distribution pattern of two-phase fluid in the vugs would accelerate the water flow in downward and horizontal directions, meanwhile decelerating in an upward direction, resulting in a different oil recovery ratio. This gives rise to the question of whether the relative permeability should be modeled as a directional dependent in a vugular porous medium since it is usually treated as an isotropic quantity. In this study, via both experiment and numerical simulation, we demonstrate that the relative permeability of vugular porous medium is dependent on the angle between the flow direction and the horizontal plane and should be considered for oil recovery estimation for carbonate reservoirs. Using the transmissibility-weighted upscaling method and a single-vug model, the relative permeability curves for different flow directions are obtained by numerical simulation. A directional relative permeability model for a vugular porous medium is also proposed.

Keywords: vugular porous medium; gravity segregation; oil recovery ratio; relative permeability; directional dependency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/7/3041/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/7/3041/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:16:y:2023:i:7:p:3041-:d:1108483

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().