Recent Advances in Capillary Desaturation Curves for Sandstone and Carbonate Reservoirs

Different enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods are usually applied to target remaining oil saturation in a reservoir after both conventional primary and secondary recovery stages. The remaining oil in the reservoir is classified into capillary trapped residual oil and unswept /bypassed oil. Mobilizing the residual oil in the reservoir is usually achieved through either decreasing the capillary forces and/or increasing the viscous or gravitational forces. The recovery of the microscopically trapped residual oil is mainly studied using capillary desaturation curve (CDC). Hence, a fundamental understanding of the CDC is needed for optimizing the design and application of different EOR methods in both sandstone and carbonate reservoirs. For sandstone reservoirs, especially water-water rocks, determining the residual oil saturation and generating CDC has been widely studied and documented in literature. On the other hand, very few studies have been conducted on carbonate rocks and less data is available. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive review of several important research studies published on CDC over the past few decades for both sandstone and carbonate reservoirs. We critically analyzed and discussed theses CDC studies based on capillary number, Bond number, and trapping number ranges. The effect of different factors on CDC were further investigated including interfacial tension, heterogeneity, permeability, and wettability. This comparative review shows that capillary desaturation curves in carbonates are shallower as opposed to these in sandstones. This is due to different factors such as the presence of high fracture density, presence of micropores, large pore size distribution, mixed-to-oil wetting nature, high permeability, and heterogeneity. In general, the critical capillary number reported in literature for sandstone rocks is in the range of 10−5 to 10−2. However, for carbonate rocks, that number ranges between 10−8 and 10−5. In addition, the wettability has been shown to have a major effect on the shape of CDC in both sandstone and carbonate rocks; different CDCs have been reported for water-wet, mixed-wet, and oil-wet rocks. The CDC shape is broader and the capillary number values are higher in oil-wet rocks compared to mixed-wet and water-wet rocks. This study provides a comprehensive and comparative analysis of CDC in both sandstone and carbonate rocks, which serves as a guide in understanding different CDCs and hence, better screening of different EOR methods for different types of reservoirs.

Capillary Desaturation Curve for Residual Nonwetting Phase in Natural Fractures

Summary The displacement of a nonwetting phase by a wetting phase is characterized by the capillary number. Different forms of capillary number have been used in the literature for flow in porous media. A capillary number for a single rock fracture has been defined in the literature, using the mean aperture to characterize the trapping and mobilization in a fracture. We propose a new capillary-number definition for fractures that incorporates geometrical characterization of the fracture, dependent on the force balance on a trapped ganglion. The new definition is validated with laboratory experiments using five distinctive model fractures. The model fractures are made of glass plates, with a wide variety of hydraulic apertures, degrees of roughness, and correlation lengths of the roughness. The fracture surfaces were characterized in detail and statistically analyzed. The aperture distribution of each model fracture was represented as a 2D network of pore bodies connected by throats. The hydraulic aperture of each model fracture was measured experimentally. Capillary desaturation curves (CDCs) were generated experimentally using water/air in forced imbibition. The transparent nature of the system permits us to determine the residual air saturation as a function of pressure gradient from the captured images. The residual nonwetting saturation/capillary-number relationship obtained from different fractures varying in aperture and roughness can be represented approximately by a single curve in terms of the new definition of the capillary number. They do not fit a single trend using the conventional definition of the capillary number.

Droplet fragmentation: 3D imaging of a previously unidentified pore-scale process during multiphase flow in porous media

Using X-ray computed microtomography, we have visualized and quantified the in situ structure of a trapped nonwetting phase (oil) in a highly heterogeneous carbonate rock after injecting a wetting phase (brine) at low and high capillary numbers. We imaged the process of capillary desaturation in 3D and demonstrated its impacts on the trapped nonwetting phase cluster size distribution. We have identified a previously unidentified pore-scale event during capillary desaturation. This pore-scale event, described as droplet fragmentation of the nonwetting phase, occurs in larger pores. It increases volumetric production of the nonwetting phase after capillary trapping and enlarges the fluid−fluid interface, which can enhance mass transfer between the phases. Droplet fragmentation therefore has implications for a range of multiphase flow processes in natural and engineered porous media with complex heterogeneous pore spaces.