Study on Microscopic Water Flooding in Porous Carbonate Reservoirs by Numerical Simulation

Abstract

The study on the flow behaviors of oil and water two phases in porous media and their influencing factor is very important to adjust the porous carbonate reservoir development strategy and enhance the oil recovery. Based on the CT (computed tomography) scanning of real carbonate reservoir core sample, the micropore structure was reconstructed, and the effects of different factors (injection rate, oil-to-water viscosity ratio, and contact angle) and secondary development methods (higher injection rate and water displacement direction optimization) on the flow behavior of oil and water two phases were explored by numerical simulation in this paper. It is found from the study that the pores in the porous carbonate reservoirs have good structural connectivity. During the displacement process, the oil-water interface mainly resides at the pore throat junction with a large change of pore size, and the Haines jumps exist in the oil-water movement; the areal sweep efficiency of the water phase is jointly affected by the viscosity effect, interfacial tension, pore structure, and injection rate. Under the minimum injection rate and oil-to-water viscosity ratio, the maximum oil recovery can be obtained, and the oil recovery is 52.62% and 57.01%, respectively. The recovery efficiency and swept area are better in a water-wet system than oil-wet system. During the secondary development, the remaining oil is hardly displaced even with the injection rate increased by a factor of 50, and it shows improvement after 250 times of initial injection rate. Changing the position of water inlet and the produced fluid outlet results in better recovery since the remaining oil near the new inlet and outlet can be effectively produced.