Unstable Immiscible Displacements in Oil-Wet Rocks

Worawutthichanyakul, Thanawut; Mohanty, Kishore K.

doi:10.1007/s11242-017-0880-6

Cited by 20 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…The latter is increased by more than two decades between CF6 and CF8, but only a limited impact is observed of the BT earliness. This opposite or limited effect of the injection flow on the BT rate for the oil-wet case has been recently observed by [13].…”

Section: Saturation Monitoringsupporting

confidence: 58%

“…This was expected as the core wettability is not taken into account in this N I number, while the previous observations demonstrated its impact on the digitation behavior. This limit of the N I number was already pointed out by [13]. For the water-wet case (corefloods CF1-CF5), the oil-recoveries at breakthrough show a possible correlation with Doorwar's number.…”

Section: Water Breakthrough Versus Dimensional Numberssupporting

confidence: 53%

“…Yet, it provides no forecast for fluids fingering shape. Unstable displacements have been extensively studied for water-wet rocks [12] but in a lesser extent for intermediate or oil-wet rock [8,[13][14][15]. The few results in the literature show that the scaling obtained for the waterwet case is not valid when the wettability is changed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A possible alternative is to upscale flow dynamics properties from laboratory experiments, to account for the complexity of these flows at higher scale resolution [18]. In recent works, several authors [13,19,20] have used and adapted Fayers' phenomenological approach of viscous fingering [21] to upscale relative-permeabilities. These models, referred to as lumped-finger, rely on the merging of all fingering in a unique finger, described by various physical parameters.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Investigation of waterflood front digitations during immiscible displacements in porous media

Mascle

Rosenberg

Roboele

et al. 2021

Oil Gas Sci. Technol. – Rev. IFP Energies nouvelles

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In this work, unstable displacements were conducted using special equipment designed to run in-situ CT-scanner experiments. All the displacements were conducted on a homogeneous Bentheimer sandstone plug, of 10 cm in diameter and 40 cm in length. Digitations (or fingering) have been observed under varying conditions of injection flowrate, displaced fluid viscosity, and core wettability. They have been characterized at both the core scale, using the core average oil saturation and the water breakthrough; and at the local scale, using the local saturations and had-hoc image processing analysis. It was found that the effect of the different flowing conditions on the front digitations could not be interpreted independently. The oil recovery at brine breakthrough showed a good correlation with the viscous fingering number for the water-wet case. However, a different scaling was observed for the oil-wet case. The interplay of the different flowing conditions mitigates the possibility of constructing a unique scaling number to account for all experimental condition. The local saturation monitoring has provided a new insight to characterize the finger shapes and analyze the production mechanisms. It allowed to distinguish two independent contributions to early breakthrough: viscous dominated digitations and capillary dominated digitations. A two-phases diagram has been constructed to plot and compare these contributions for all flowing conditions. Their evolutions show the main production mechanisms during the flooding. We observed that the viscous digitations were not causing phase trapping at core scale: the core is completely swept after breakthrough. For the water-wet case, we found that the local oil recovery of swept zone remained constant before and after breakthrough while for the oil-wet case it is improving during all the water flooding process.

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Section: Saturation Monitoringsupporting

confidence: 58%

Section: Water Breakthrough Versus Dimensional Numberssupporting

confidence: 53%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Investigation of waterflood front digitations during immiscible displacements in porous media

Mascle

Rosenberg

Roboele

et al. 2021

Oil Gas Sci. Technol. – Rev. IFP Energies nouvelles

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Investigation of the fingering phenomenon in sand stone cores, considering the variation of viscosity ratio, velocity, and diameter, shows that the developed viscous finger number does not work in an oil-wet porous medium. To deal with this challenge, the correlating dimensionless number is modified for the oil-wet porous medium (Worawutthichanyakul and Mohanty, 2017). At lab scale, fingering is dominant due to small heterogeneity and consequently causes oil bypassing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental and CFD studies on determination of injection and production wells location considering reservoir heterogeneity and capillary number

Ahmadi

Ghandi

Riazi

et al. 2019

Oil Gas Sci. Technol. – Rev. IFP Energies nouvelles

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The in-depth knowledge of reservoir heterogeneity is imperative for identifying the location of production and injection wells. The present study aimed at experimentally investigating the process of water flooding in the viscous oil-saturated glass micromodels, which contain layers with different permeability where the fractures were placed in different locations. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of flooding were also conducted to study the impact of different water flow rates and wettability states. The results showed that the fractures, which have a deviation with the trend of maximum pressure gradient line, would widen the water path and vice versa. The performance of injection wells would increase the recovery factor by 18% if these would be located in the zones with high permeability for low flow rates of water. With changes in wettability state from water to oil wet conditions, the oil production will increase by 11%. Computational Fluid Dynamics results also indicated that an increase in the capillary number from 0.8 × 10−6 to 1.6 × 10−5, would cause the recovery factor to decrease as much as 14.34% while further increase from 1.6 × 10−5 to 2.24 × 10−5, the oil production will increase by 9.5%. Comparison between the obtained oil recoveries indicates that the maximum oil recoveries will happen when the injector well is located in the zone where ascending permeability, capillary number greater than 4.81 × 10−6 and also fracture with the most deviation with pressure gradient line (i.e. angular pattern) are gathered in an area between the injection and production wells.

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