Numerical Simulation Workflow using Carbonate Digital Rock Built from Integrated Lattice Boltzmann and Kriging Method

Abstract

Abstract Formation evaluation including porosity and directional permeability assessment in complex carbonate formations is challenging due to the anisotropic and heterogeneous nature of the formation. The pore structure can be captured by digital rock technology, which makes the constriction of numerical whole core, and the numerical simulations of chemical enhanced oil recovery on digital rock possible. We introduce a new workflow to construct the digital rock based on micron-CT scanned sequential images of the carbonate sample. Firstly, we apply the modified Otsu's global thresholding method to convert the grey-scale micron-CT scanned images to binary images, and we systematically divide the whole core 3D segmented image into small blocks or representative elementary volume (totally 10143 blocks including inactive blocks). Then we estimate the porosity of each block, and use Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) to simulate fluid flow in randomly selected blocks and accurately compute the directional permeability of these blocks by simulating Darcy flow through them. The permeability tensor of other blocks is estimated by applying Kriging method based on the estimated porosity of all the blocks and the accurately calculated permeability tensor of the selected blocks. Then we simulate the polymer flooding on the constructed digital rock and show that the simulation process is computational efficient. We calculate the porosity and permeability of the constructed digital whole core and compare them with laboratory measurements. The image analyzed porosity of whole digital rock is comparable with laboratory measurements by only 1% difference. The simulated permeability value with calibration of the whole digital rock is also in good agreement with experimental result by 3.5% difference. Then we simulate the polymer flooding on the constructed digital rock and show that the simulation process is computational efficient. The proposed digital whole core construction workflow integrates the accuracy of LBM simulation and the efficiency of kriging method. The accurately constructed digital whole core only have 10143 blocks including inactive blocks, which greatly reduces the heavy computation time of chemical enhanced oil recovery simulation on digital rock and makes the proposed method more practical in routine analysis and modeling.