Evaluation of Relative Permeability of a Tight Oil Formation in Daqing Oilfield

Abstract

Relative permeability is one of the most important petrophysical parameters to evaluate a reservoir’s production during primary and subsequent secondary or enhanced oil recovery processes. Yet measured relative permeability data for tight oil reservoirs are very scarce to find in the literature, mainly because the measurement is difficult and time consuming to make. In this paper the protocol and results of water/oil, surfactant /oil, CO2/oil, and N2/oil relative permeability are presented, and compared to the digital core analysis results where wettability was set to water-wet or mixed-wet, as well as the Brooks-Corey model. Amott-Harvey wettability index was measured to explain the differences. The target formation is a sandstone tight oil formation located in Songliao Basin, China. Its permeability is mostly in the 0.01-5mD range. Core and oil samples from the target formation were used in the wettability and relative permeability determination. Relative permeability was measured at reservoir conditions using a customized core flow setup. Core samples were cleaned then wettability restored. To match the reservoir fluid viscosity and avoid changing wettability, stock tank oil was blended with kerosene to reservoir fluid viscosity at reservoir temperature. Relative permeability was measured using the unsteady-state method. Amott-Harvey wettability index was measured on core samples from the same formation at reservoir temperature. Amott-Harvey wettability index results show that the restored wettability ranged from water-wet to oil-wet, with most samples being mixed-wt. The addition of non-ionic surfactant promoted wettability change toward more water-wetness. However, anionic surfactant had little effect on reversing wettability. Oil relative permeability (Kro) results obtained from the digital rock analysis (DRA) assuming uniform water-wetness are consistent with relative permeability calculated from mercury injection capillary pressure using Brooks-Corey model. When wettability of the digital rock model was set to mixed-wet, the resulted Kro matches the measured Kro of a sister plug to the sample used to build the digital rock model, which is consistent with the wettability measurements. The addition of surfactants increased both water and oil relative permeability through wettability alteration and IFT reduction. CO2 flood was conducted as an immiscible flood due to reservoir pressure lower than MMP. CO2 flood left high residual oil saturation compared with water floods. N2 flood left even more oil behind compared with CO2 flood. Relative permeability provides key input parameters for formation evaluation and the subsequent EOR processes such as huff-n-puff operations. There are very little published relative permeability data for tight oil reservoirs. This work extends the relative permeability database, and is a starting point for future EOR work.