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Three-Phase Oil Relative Permeability in Water-Wet Media: A Comprehensive Study

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Abstract

We report experimental three-phase oil relative permeability in two water-wet media (a sandpack and a Berea sandstone core) along different saturation paths. Three oils with different viscosities, compositions, and spreading coefficients were used in the measurements. The data show that oil relative permeability can vary significantly along different saturation paths. Most importantly, we find that despite the significant (orders of magnitude) variation of oil relative permeability along different saturation paths, the oil relative permeability in each medium can be collapsed into a single relative permeability curve, once they are plotted as a function of mobile oil saturation. However, this collapsed curve varies depending on the porous media. We show that the same behavior occurs in the relative permeability data published over the past 50 years. These observations indicate that the key factor in differences between oil permeabilities in the same porous media is changes in the residual oil saturation. We examine the performance of most commonly used relative permeability models, i.e., Corey, Saturation-Weighted Interpolation (SWI), and Stone against our data. Given the importance of residual oil saturation, we fit the experimental data along different saturation paths by treating the residual oil saturation in these models as the fitting parameter while keeping the other parameters constant. We find that the Corey and SWI models fit the data very well while the Stone model performs poorly at low saturations. We find that residual oil saturation is a nonlinear function of gas/water saturation as opposed to linear relationship previously suggested by others.

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Abbreviations

C :

Fitting constant, dimensionless

\(C_\mathrm{s}\) :

Spreading coefficient, N/m

\(k_\mathrm{ri} \) :

Relative permeability to phase i, dimensionless

\(k_\mathrm{ro\left( g \right) }\) :

Two-phase oil relative permeability in oil/gas system, dimensionless

\(k_\mathrm{ro\left( w \right) }\) :

Two-phase oil relative permeability in oil/water system, dimensionless

\(k_\mathrm{ro(wr)}\) :

Two-phase oil relative permeability at residual water saturation, dimensionless

\(n_\mathrm{i} \) :

Phase i exponent for relative permeability, dimensionless

\(n_\mathrm{krog}\) :

Oil exponent of gas/oil relative permeability curve, dimensionless

\(n_\mathrm{krow}\) :

Oil exponent of oil/water relative permeability curve, dimensionless

\(S_\mathrm{i} \) :

Saturation of phase i, dimensionless

\(S_\mathrm{gr} \) :

Residual gas saturation, dimensionless

\(S_\mathrm{om} \) :

Three-phase residual oil saturation, dimensionless

\(S_\mathrm{or} \) :

Residual oil saturation, dimensionless

\(S_\mathrm{wr} \) :

Residual water saturation, dimensionless

i:

Phase

g:

Gas

o:

Oil

w:

Water

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the financial support of the gas enhanced oil recovery joint industry project (JIP) at the University of Texas at Austin. The authors also would like to thank Xiongyu Chen and Paul Jordan for their helps during the experiments. The relative permeability versus saturation data are available upon request by emailing David A. DiCarlo or Amir Kianinejad at dicarlo@mail.utexas.edu or kianinejad.amir@utexas.edu.

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  1. Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Amir Kianinejad & David A. DiCarlo

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  1. Amir Kianinejad
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Correspondence to Amir Kianinejad.

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Kianinejad, A., DiCarlo, D.A. Three-Phase Oil Relative Permeability in Water-Wet Media: A Comprehensive Study. Transp Porous Med 112, 665–687 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-016-0669-z

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