The Effect of Temperature on Two-Phase Oil/Water Relative Permeability in Different Rock/Fluid Systems

Abstract

Abstract Two-phase oil/water relative permeability measurements were conducted at ambient and high temperatures in two different rock-fluid systems; one using a clean Poly-Alpha-Olefin (PAO) oil and the other with Athabasca bitumen. The tests were performed in a clean sand-pack with the confining pressure of 800 psi, using deionized water as the aqueous phase. Both the JBN method and the history match approach were utilized to obtain the relative permeability from the results of isothermal oil displacement tests. The contact angle and IFT measurements were carried out to assess any possible wettability alteration and change in fluid/fluid interaction at higher temperatures. Results, Observations, Conclusions: The results of the clean system using the viscous PAO oil confirmed that the two-phase oil/water relative permeability in this ultra-clean system is practically insensitive to the temperature. The slight variation in oil endpoint relative permeability, especially at ambient condition, was attributed to variations in the packing of sand. It was found that the history matching derived two-phase relative permeability from the highest temperature test provides reasonably good history matches of the other displacements that were conducted at lower temperatures. In addition, it is shown that the JBN approach based relative permeability curves show larger variations, primarily due to insufficient volume of water injection at lower temperatures, which makes the practical residual oil saturation much higher than the true residual. In contrast with the ultra-clean system, the results obtained with bitumen showed much larger variations in relative permeability with temperature. Most of the reported studies involving history matching approach treat the low-temperature measurements as the base case and show that changes in relative permeability are needed to history-match the tests at higher temperatures. We have shown that the displacement done at the highest temperature provides a more reliable estimate of the relative permeability and, in some cases, this relative permeability can successfully history match tests done at lower temperatures. In view of the impracticality of injecting sufficient water to reach close to real residual oil saturation at low temperatures, it would be better to obtain relative permeability data at high temperatures for characterizing the two-phase flow behavior of viscous oil systems.