Fitting Relative Permeability’s Curves Based on Laboratory Production Data for A Thermal Composite Core Flooding Experiment

Abstract

Numerical simulators are effective tools for an adequate understanding of models geological and dynamic properties under which enhanced oil recovery techniques are investigated. Core flooding experiments are usually conducted for calibrating simulated rock and fluid properties against actual test results at micro-scales, and for further scaling up processes to the reservoir scale. In this paper, laboratory experiments data were used as input for a numerical simulator to study the effect of relative permeability end points on production data. The laboratory experiments were completed to evaluate steam core flooding test performance and study the effect of steam on rock relative permeability’s. The test was performed utilizing a composite stack from a sandstone reservoir and super-heated steam at reservoir pressure. Test results provided numerous properties of rock and fluid properties, steam flooding data and relative permeability’s calculations. 3D core model was created with 28.89 cm length and 3.08 cm diameter. The skeleton was divided into 45×3×9 in x, y, z directions respectively, with 1215 total number of grid cells. Simulation model was initialized at the same condition of the actual laboratory experiment, and the resulted production data were utilized to match the relative permeability curves.

The results confirmed that the production history is strongly affected by changes in relative permeability tables, particularly; the residual oil saturation (Sor) and the curve exponents values, by which they could effectively be utilized for fitting and optimizing relative permeability curves. Care should be taken when using the relative permeability data as input for reservoir simulation studies.