Investigation of gas condensate drop‐out effect on gas relative permeability by Lattice Boltzmann modelling

Abstract

In a gas condensate reservoir, a drastic pressure drop in the vicinity of the wellbore makes it subject to gas condensate drop‐out. This phenomenon can adversely affect the productivity of the well and reduce gas recovery. The objective of this paper is to conduct a two‐phase fluid flow simulation on two‐dimensional porous media to understand the effect of the gas condensate drop‐out on the gas relative permeability values. In order to do so, lattice Boltzmann (LB) modelling was applied as a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach to perform the simulations in homogeneous and heterogeneous porous structures. The developed model was constrained by periodic boundary conditions at inlet and outlet and bounce‐back boundary condition at fluid‐solid interfaces. It was shown that the model can appropriately monitor formation and movement of the condensate droplets as a result of the pressure drop as well as blockages due to the entrance of the droplets into the throats. A consistent decrease in gas relative permeability values with condensate saturation was observed. It was also indicated that the condensate droplets become mobile at higher critical saturations in the heterogeneous system due to the dominance of capillary forces over viscous forces in the less permeable areas. Such dominance results in more severe blockages in the heterogeneous systems, as the simulation results confirmed.

Three-Dimensional Printing of Synthetic Core Plugs as an Alternative to Natural Core Plugs: Experimental and Numerical Study

“…The boundary conditions applied were bounce back (for the internal solid no-slip boundary) and periodical (for the external boundary). Numerical simulation of fluid flow in digital rocks using the LBM is described in detail in the references [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

“…The LBM provides an accurate, high-throughput method for solving fluid flow problems in porous media with complex geometries, such as those generated via digital rock physics. LBM is widely used to model pore-scale flow in porous structures [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. For a general introduction to the application of lattice Boltzmann theory in porous media, see [11].…”

A pore‐scale investigation for recovering adsorptive capacity of activated carbon fibre felt using electrothermal desorption combined with ozonization in‐situ degradation method

“…On the other hand, one of the difficulties of porescale simulation lies in the treatment of irregular boundaries in the stochastic pore structures. Fortunately, as result of its prominent advantages, including the convenient implementation in the irregular boundary conditions and the high level of parallel computation, [18][19][20][21][22][23][24] the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) provides a promising numerical model to study the complex transfer behaviours in porous media at the pore scale. In recent years, LBM has been successfully used in solving the reactive or absorptive transport process into various pore structures, such as porous electrodes, [25] porous shale gas beds, [26] and porous adsorption beds.…”