Wettability Quantification in Mixed-Wet Rocks Using a New NMR-Based Method

Abstract

Summary Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements have been attractive options for wettability characterization of reservoir rocks as they are sensitive to the type of fluid in contact with the grain surface. Several NMR-based wettability indices are documented in previous publications. Most of these methods require extensive calibration or involve complex inversion algorithms, which makes them computationally expensive and complicates their applicability in mixed-wet multimodal rocks. In this paper, we introduce a new NMR-based wettability index and verify its reliability in pore-scale and core-scale domains using numerical simulations and experimental measurements, respectively. This new index requires calibration at fully water-saturated water-wet and fully hydrocarbon-saturated hydrocarbon-wet states and can be applied to mixed-wet rocks at any fluid saturation level. This new NMR-based wettability index is a function of the transverse magnetization (T2) of mixed-wet rocks, the bulk relaxivity and saturation of each fluid, and the T2 distributions for fully water-wet and hydrocarbon-wet samples of the same rock type. The reliability of the new index was first tested in the pore-scale domain. For this part, we selected several pore-scale microcomputed tomography (CT) images of carbonate and sandstone rocks. We used a previously developed finite volume simulator to model the T2 responses in these images at fully water-wet and fully hydrocarbon-wet wettability states. Then we generated synthetic partially saturated mixed-wet samples and simulated T2 responses in these synthetic images. We used the simulated T2 results for determining their NMR-based wettability index and verified its applicability in the pore-scale domain. Next, we tested the reliability of the new NMR-based wettability index in the core-scale domain using NMR measurements in four Texas Cream (TC) rock samples, obtained from the Edwards formation. We altered the wettability of the cores to be water-, hydrocarbon-, and mixed-wet by injecting brine, a naphthenic acid in decane solution, or an anionic surfactant solution. We quantified the wettability of these samples using the Amott-Harvey (AH) index and contact angle measurements. Next, we measured the T2 distribution of these samples at different fluid saturation levels. Finally, we quantified the wettability values of these core samples using the new NMR-based index and compared them to those obtained from the AH index and contact angle measurements. We documented successful verification of the proposed method on samples with wettability ranging from −0.90 to 0.98 and from −0.6 to 0.5 (independently quantified using the AH method) in the pore- and core-scale domains, respectively. Results demonstrated that the new NMR-based wettability index reliably estimates the wettability of mixed-wet rocks in a wide range of wettability states. The new wettability index can potentially improve the speed and reliability of NMR-based wettability characterization and is promising for log-scale wettability assessment in mixed-wet rocks.