Introduction Relative permeabilities are factual data necessary to any prediction of reservoir production behavior. One important problem in determining relative permeabilities of porous media to gas is the effect of gas slippage on these determinations. Since certain aspects of the slippage phenomenon still remain unknown, this study is particularly concerned with that problem. The validity of the theory of gas slippage as it is applied to the flow of gas through porous media has been well established. Therefore, in determining the permeabilities of porous media to gas by ordinary laboratory procedure, i.e., at atmospheric pressure, the slippage correction should be considered. Rose performed experiments on gas relative permeabilities which indicated that the effect of gas slippage on the measured effective gas permeabilities at various liquid saturations decreased with an increase in liquid saturation. Following Rose, it was substantiated experimentally that the effective gas permeabilities at the various liquid saturations extrapolated to infinite mean pressure were the same as the non-wetting liquid permeabilities at the same saturations. This same paper also presented data which showed that the magnitude of the slippage between those values of gas effective permeability determined at atmospheric pressure and those found by extrapolation to infinite mean pressure decreased with an increase in liquid saturation. However, these experiments were not performed at liquid saturations above 30 per cent. Therefore, the purpose of this experimental work was to determine the effect of gas slippage on permeability measurements at liquid saturations in excess of 30 per cent. Apparatus Five core samples were used in this work: two synthetic Alundum samples (A-1, and A-2), a Nichols Buff sandstone sample (NB-13), and two samples from producing formations, a Soso sandstone (S-1), and a vugular dolomitic limestone (R-7). The core samples ranged in permeability from 32 to 663 md. These cores were chosen because they represented a fairly wide range of permeabilities and probably a considerable difference in pore size and pore size distribution.
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