Adding surfactant into the displacing aqueous phase during surfactant-enhanced aquifer remediation of NAPL contamination and in chemical flooding oil recovery significantly changes interfacial tension (IFT) (σ) on water–oil interfaces within porous media. The change in IFT may have a large impact on relative permeability for the two-phase flow system. In most subsurface flow investigations, how...

Many world class large carbonate reservoirs leave behind at least half of the initial oil in place. Typically water injection is used to improve oil recovery while gas injection is used to maintain pressure or to promote oil gravity drainage. Immiscible gas injection, including injection of CO2, has been considered but not implemented on a large scale for economic reasons. Furthermore, interest...

Capillary pressure and relative permeability are important parameters in geothermal reservoir engineering. It is essential to represent capillary pressure curves mathematically in an appropriate way. The Brooks-Corey capillary pressure model has been accepted widely, however it has been found that the Brooks-Corey model cannot represent capillary pressure curves of The Geysers rock samples. In ...

We present various numerical studies conducted with a novel pore-scale simulation technology called Direct Hydrodynamic (DHD) Simulation that can be used to study multiphase flow at various scales ranging from individual pore-scale events to complex scenarios like capillary de-saturation and relative permeability of digitized rock samples. DHD uses a diffuse interface description for fluid-flui...

We use a generalized pore network model in combination with image-based experiments to understand the parameters that control upscaled flow properties. The study is focued on water-flooding through reservoir sandstone under water-wet and mixed-wet conditions. A set of sensitivity studies presented quantify role wettability, geometry, initial boundary conditions as well selection used computatio...

Many laboratory and field scale trials have shown that modified salinity water flooding increases the mobility of oil improves recovery. However, simulation process guided by core data leads to inaccurate prediction recovery if effect saturation history reservoir on relative permeability is ignored. Here, we address this problem proposing three models illustrating interplay among wettability al...

Carbonate reservoirs rock typing plays a pivotal role in the construction of reservoir static models and volumetric calculations. The procedure for rock type determination starts with the determination of depositional and diagenetic rock types through petrographic studies of the thin sections prepared from core plugs and cuttings. In the second step of rock typing study, electrofacies are deter...

[1] Relative permeabilities are the key descriptors in classical formulations of multiphase flow in porous media. Experimental evidence and an analysis of pore-scale physics demonstrate conclusively that relative permeabilities are not single functions of fluid saturations and that they display strong hysteresis effects. In this paper, we evaluate the relevance of relative permeability hysteres...

High-resolution X-ray imaging combined with a steady-state flow experiment is used to demonstrate how pore-scale displacement affects macroscopic properties in an altered-wettability microporous carbonate, where porosity and fluid saturation can be directly obtained from the grey-scale micro-CT images. The resolvable macro pores are largely oil-wet average thermodynamic contact angle of 120°. p...