A Comparative Study of the Effect of Gas/Oil IFT Variation on Two- and Three-Phase Relative Permeability and the Performance of WAG Injection at Laboratory Scale

Abstract

Abstract Gas/oil interfacial tension (IFT) is one of the most important parameters that impact the performance of gas injection in an oil reservoir. The choice or design of the composition of the gas injected for EOR is usually affected by the gas/oil IFT. In conventional reservoir simulation, IFT does not explicitly appear in the equations of flow and therefore its effect must be captured by the shape and values of relative permeability curves. A few studies have been previously reported for IFT effect on two-phase flow but very little have been done to investigate gas/oil IFT effect under three-phase flow conditions. The objective of this study is, firstly, to investigate the impact of gas/oil IFT reduction on two- and three-phase relative permeabilities using coreflood experiments. Secondly, to investigate the effect of changing gas/oil IFT value (immiscible and near-miscible) on the performance of WAG injections and residual oil saturation reduction at laboratory scale. Two- and three-phase (WAG) coreflood experiments have been performed on water-wet and mixed-wet cores at three different gas/oil IFT conditions. These experiments were conducted on Clashach sandstone cores with a permeability of 65 and 1000 mD. The two- and three-phase relative permeabilities were estimated from the results of the coreflood experiments using our in-house software (3RPSim) and were compared with each other on the basis of their gas/oil IFT values. Moreover, the impact of gas/oil IFT reduction on the performance of gas and WAG injection and in particular on the reduction of residual oil saturation was investigated. The results of our studies were also compared with the existing literature on the laboratory investigation of WAG injection. The results show that in two-phase gas/oil systems, the relative permeability of non-wetting phase is more affected by a reduction in the gas/oil IFT compared of the relative permeability of the wetting phase. Comparing the curvature of the gas and oil relative permeability curves shows that although the curvature decreases by a reduction in gas/oil IFT but it is still far away from straight line even at ultra-low IFT values. In three-phase flow system, reduction of gas/oil IFT affects the relative permeabilities of all the three phases (gas, oil and water). The results show that at high gas/oil IFT or immiscible WAG injection, the most reduction in residual oil saturation is achieved in the first injection cycle and further WAG cycles do not result in a significant additional reduction in oil saturation. On the contrary, at low gas/oil IFT or near-miscible WAG injection, the residual oil saturation keeps decreasing as the number of WAG cycles increases. Moreover, the reduction in residual oil saturation was more effective when the immiscible WAG experiments started with gas injection (secondary WAG).