Abstract
Modeling relative permeability in multi-scale rocks and fractured
networks has broad applications to understanding oil production and
recovery in reservoir formations. Natural porous media are typically
composed of two domains; one incorporates macropores, while the other
contains micropores. In the literature, numerous theoretic models have
been developed based on the series-parallel tubes approach (Mualem,
1976; van Genuchten, 1980) to estimate wetting-phase relative
permeability (krw) from pore size distribution or capillary pressure
curve. In this study, we, however, invoke concepts from critical path
analysis (CPA), a theoretical technique from statistical physics. CPA
has been successfully used to model flow and transport in porous media
(Hunt, 2001; Ghanbarian-Alavijeh and Hunt, 2012; Hunt et al., 2013;
2014; Ghanbarian et al., 2016; Ghanbarian and Hunt, 2017). We estimate
the wetting-phase relative permeability from the measured capillary
pressure curve using two methods: (1) critical path analysis (CPA), and
(2) series-parallel tubes (vG-M). To evaluate these models, we use 26
experiments from the literature for which capillary pressure and
wetting-phase relative permeability data were measured at 500 data point
over a wide range of wetting-phase saturation (Sw). Results demonstrate
that CPA estimates krw more precisely than vG-M. We show that accurate
krw estimation by the CPA-based model needs precise characterization of
capillary pressure curve and accurate calculation of the crossover point
(Swx) separating the two domains.