Effect of Temperature on Two Phase Oil-Water Relative Permeabilities

Review of the effect of temperature on oil-water relative permeability in porous rocks of oil reservoirs

“…This is not surprising since the water was displaced by 13 injecting a viscous refined oil at ambient conditions in all tests. 14 Nourmohammad et al [48] suggested that 15 PVs of oil injection is adequate to achieve the irreducible water saturation, which was reported to be 0.15 in all tests. It is notable that the 16 temperature range in this study only varied from room temperature to 85 °C.…”

“…Temperature The temperature was found to have no direct impact on the residual oil saturation within a temperature range of 24 to 85 °C in a study performed by Nourmohammad et al [48]. Wilson [86] also observed the same result for the residual oil saturation.…”

“…To obtain the complete relative permeability curve, usually between 5 and 10 different ratios of water/oil flow rates are employed [24,63,64]. Darcy's law is applied to estimate the effective permeability of each phase using the measured pressure drop across the core and imposed flow rates [29,48,62].…”

“…Although a large number of experimental studies have been carried out in different ranges of temperature and pressure using different porous media, the 6 findings often contradict each other. Some researchers [6,7,37,48,51,86,90,91] have concluded 7 that the relative permeability to oil and water is independent of temperature even when the 8 temperature increases by more than 200 ºC, while others [2,20,42] reported that even a small 9 increase in temperature can change the oil/water relative permeability curves significantly. One 10 can easily conclude that the effect of temperature would be system dependent but it is not clear in what type of reservoir systems one should expect the relative permeability to change more with temperature and in which direction.…”

“…Among many studies of the effect of temperature on two-phase flow that have been reported during the past sixty years, a large majority of them [3, 4, 14, 16-18, 20, 21, 23-25, 38, 40, 42, 44-46, 50, 53, 82, 94] report that the residual oil saturation decreases as temperature is elevated. Nonetheless, several studies [8,17,19,37,47,48,51,86,90,91] suggest that the residual oil saturation was independent of temperature. Very often, the measurement of this parameter is not exact due to experimental limitations in the measurements of relative permeability, such as limitations in the number of pore volumes that can be injected.…”