A New Method to Quantify Wettability from Resistivity Measurements: Workflow Development and Experimental Core-Scale Verification

Abstract

Abstract The wettability of reservoir rocks impacts many aspects of well planning and production, from estimating hydrocarbon saturation to enhanced oil recovery. Wettability is often experimentally quantified through laboratory measurements; however, in-situ wettability assessment is challenging. In this work, we introduce a new method to quantify wettability using resistivity measurements obtained from either well logs or core measurements. The objectives of this paper are (i) to introduce a resistivity-based wettability index from our recent analytically-derived resistivity model that takes into account wettability and (ii) to verify the reliability of the new resistivity-based wettability index using Amott Index, U.S. Bureau of Mines (USBM), and/or contact angle wettability measurements as reference. We quantify the resistivity-based wettability index using our new analytically-derived resistivity model which requires as inputs the resistivity of the rock-fluid system and brine, water saturation, porosity, and pore-geometry-related parameters. Water saturation and porosity can be estimated from the interpretation of borehole geophysical or core measurements. The pore-geometry-related parameters can be estimated from image analysis performed on three-dimensional pore-scale images (e.g. micro-computed tomography) or through a physics-based calibration method. Next, we calculate the resistivity-based wettability index by minimizing the error between the measured and predicted resistivity of the rock-fluid system. To verify this method, we prepare core samples covering a wide range of wettability states and saturation levels. We vary the wettability of the samples by injecting brine, an anionic surfactant solution, or a naphthenic acid and decane solution to make the core samples water-, mixed-, or oil-wet, respectively. Finally, we obtain the resistivity-based wettability index in the core samples and verify its reliability by comparing the estimates against the Amott Index and the contact angle measurements. We also used previously documented data in Berea sandstone for further verification of the new method. We successfully demonstrated the reliability of the introduced resistivity-based wettability index for limestone and sandstone core samples. The resistivity-based wettability indices were in agreement with both Amott and USBM Indices for the limestone and sandstone samples, respectively. The average absolute difference between the resistivity-based wettability index and the Amott and USBM Indices was less than 0.4 for all the core samples documented in this paper. The outcomes of this work can potentially be used for assessment of wettability from borehole geophysical measurements, to deliver in-situ properties of rocks in real-time. Additionally, the new resistivity model consists only of physically meaningful parameters and minimizes calibration efforts. Furthermore, if the wettability, porosity, and pore-geometry-related parameters are known, then we can use this resistivity model to obtain water saturation without the need for calibration.