GAS RELATIVE PERMEABILITY HYSTERESIS DURING IMMISCIBLE WATER ALTERNATING GAS INJECTION

• Main Author: HOSSEINI, SEYED JAVAD
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
• Online Access: http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/id/eprint/21680/1/2012%20-PETROLEUM%20-%20GAS%20RELATIVE%20PERMEABILITY%20HYSTERESIS%20DURING%20IMMISCIBLE%20WATER%20ALTERNATING%20GAS%20INJECTION%20-%20SEYED%20JAVAD%20HOSSEINI.pdf; http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/id/eprint/21680/

Although WAG (Water Alternating Gas) has been studied and implemented widely for hydrocarbon recovery improvement, still there are some uncertainties regarding the three-phase flow. One of the most important uncertainty areas is modeling the three-phase relative permeability for three-phase flow. Commercial simulators by using currently implemented three-phase models cannot capture all of the features behind three-phase flow. Hysteresis is one of the crucial features of three-phase flow which IS still remained controversial in three-phase relative permeability and needs to be elaborated. Some of the current relative permeability models have accounted for this phenomenon and in some of them, hysteresis is lacking. Two-phase models usually fail to predict the actual behavior of the hysteresis in three-phase flow. Some of the three-phase models also take in to account some of the features of hysteresis but not all of them. In the simulation process of water alternating gas, hysteresis modeling is a corner stone of the workflow. If this work step is not done properly and not elaborated seriously, the results of the simulation will not really help to understand different aspects of the WAG injection scenario for field application. In this study, first a literature survey has been done on recovery definition and WAG history. Then fundamentals of displacement process and trapping mechanisms in porous media have been addressed. Hysteretic in two and three-phase relative permeability models have been reviewed and the comparison has been made in terms of the applicability for simulating immiscible WAG (I-WAG) injection. The more applicable model which is commercially implemented in the reservoir simulator was selected and model prediction versus selected experimental data was shown and discrepancies are highlighted.