Characterizing sub-core hysteretic relative permeability and capillary
pressure for accurate imbibition coreflood modeling
Abstract
Using x-ray tomography in coreflooding experiments allows to
characterize the sub-core, mm-scale, multiphase flow properties such as
permeability, porosity, relative permeability and capillary pressure.
This has been studied previously for CO2-brine drainage experiments and
a procedure has been developed for sub-core property estimation, showing
that their implementation in numerical models leads to accurate
predictions of experimental measurements, such as core saturation
distribution. Much less work has been conducted regarding CO2-brine
imbibition modeling. In this work we characterize hysteretic sub-core
properties using experimental data of CO2-brine imbibition coreflooding
conducted on two core samples. We adopt the approach of [1] for
sub-core capillary pressure modeling and that of [2] for relative
permeability modeling, however, we find that these are not sufficient
for accurate modeling of saturation distribution within the core. We
improve the models by considering a unique turning point and Land
trapping coefficient for each mm-scale grid block in our model and also
by calculating new imbibition characteristic relative permeability
curves based on a procedure developed in [3]. Results show
improvements in matching experimental data. [1] R. Pini, and S.M.
Benson. “Capillary pressure heterogeneity and hysteresis for the
supercritical CO2/water system in a sandstone.” Advances in Water
Resources 108 (2017): 277-292. [2] O. Dury, U. Fischer, and R.
Schulin. “A comparison of relative nonwetting‐phase permeability
models.” Water Resources Research 35.5 (1999): 1481-1493. [3] E.
Anto-Darkwah, S.M. Benson, and A. Rabinovich. “An improved procedure
for sub-core property characterization using data from multiple
coreflooding experiments.” International Journal of Greenhouse Gas
Control 105 (2021): 103226.