Fast and reliable EOR process selection is a critical step in any EOR project. The digital rock (DR) approach jointly developed by Shell and SLB is aimed to be the smallest scale yet advanced EOR Pilot technology. In this document, we describe the application of DR technology for screening of different EOR mechanisms at pore-scale focused to enhance recovery from a particular reservoir formation. For EOR applications DR brings unique capabilities as it can fully describe different multiphase flow properties at different regimes. The vital part of the proposed approach is the high-efficient pore-scale simulation technology called Direct Hydrodynamics (DHD) Simulator. DHD is based on a density functional approach applied for hydrodynamics of complex systems. Currently, DHD is benchmarked against multiple analytical solutions and experimental tests and optimized for high performance (HPC) computing. It can handle many physical phenomena: multiphase compositional flows with phase transitions, different types of fluid-rock and fluid-fluid interactions with different types of fluid rheology. As an input data DHD uses 3D pore texture and composition of rocks with distributed micro-scale wetting properties and pore fluid model (PVT, rheology, diffusion coefficients, and adsorption model). In a particular case, the pore geometry comes from 3D X-ray microtomographic images of a rock sample. The fluid model is created from lab data on fluid characterization. The output contains the distribution of components, velocity and pressure fields at different stages of displacement process. Several case studies are demonstrated in this work and include comparative analysis of effectiveness of applications of different chemical EOR agents performed on digitized core samples.

No abstract