FRACTALS AND SECONDARY MIGRATION

Abstract

The process of secondary migration, in which oil and gas are transported from the source rocks, through water saturated sedimentary carrier rocks, to a trap or reservoir can be described in terms of the gravity driven penetration of a low-density non-wetting fluid through a porous medium saturated with a wetting fluid. This process has been modeled in the laboratory and by computer simulations using homogeneous porous media. Under these conditions, the pattern formed by the migrating fluid can be described in terms of a string of fractal blobs. The low density internal structure of the fractal blobs and the concentration of the transport process onto the self-affine strings of blobs (migration channels) both contribute to the small effective hydrocarbon saturation in the carrier rocks. This allows the hydrocarbon fluids to penetrate the enormous volume of carrier rock without all of the hydrocarbon being trapped in immobile isolated bubbles. In practice, heterogeneities in the carrier rocks play an important role. In some cases, these heterogeneities can be represented by fractal models and these fractal heterogeneity models provide a basis for more realistic simulations of secondary migration. Fractures may play a particularly important role and migration along open fractures was simulated using a self-affine fractal model for the fluctuating fracture aperture.