Consistent prediction of absolute permeability in carbonates without upscaling

• Main Authors: Khodja Mohamed R., Li Jun, Hussaini Syed Rizwanullah, Ali Abdelwahab Z., Al-Mukainah Hani S., Jangda Zaid Z.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: EDP Sciences 2020-01-01
• Series: Oil & Gas Science and Technology
• Online Access: https://ogst.ifpenergiesnouvelles.fr/articles/ogst/full_html/2020/01/ogst190332/ogst190332.html
• ISSN: 1294-4475; 1953-8189

We describe a study focused on the absolute permeability of reservoir carbonate rocks from the Middle East and involving comparison of experimental data and numerical estimates obtained by combining digital-rock and Lattice-Boltzmann Methods (LBM). The question of the “representativeness” of the site at which the simulation is performed is addressed as follows. First, a low-resolution, CT X-ray scan of the core plug is performed to identify regions of large porosity (millimeter-sized vugs, etc.). These regions are then avoided to postselect smaller sites (site volume ~ 1 mm3) which are to be scanned at higher resolutions (voxel size < dominant pore-throat size of the core plug). A “representativeness” criterion based on an empirically-inspired “representativeness” measure (R-measure) is used to eliminate those sites for which R > b, where b is an upper bound (typically, b = 1). Essentially, the measure estimates how well the postselected sites capture the experimental porosity and the dominant pore-throat size of the core plug. This leads to a small set of sites for which the simulations are both computationally manageable and yield a reasonable estimate of the permeability: the experimental and predicted values differ by a factor of about 3 on average, which is a particularly significant result given the challenging heterogeneous pore space of carbonate samples. We believe the suggested methodology to be an adequate and practical way to circumvent upscaling.