The impact of wettability on the co-moving velocity of two-fluid flow in porous media

TL;DR

This study investigates how wettability influences the co-moving velocity of two-fluid flow in porous media, revealing that the constitutive coefficients are nearly invariant across wetting conditions and proposing a new method to estimate relative permeability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to reconstruct relative permeability curves using co-moving velocity, demonstrating invariance of constitutive coefficients across wetting conditions.

Findings

Coefficients of the constitutive equation are nearly the same for all wetting conditions.

A simple method to estimate oil relative permeability from co-moving velocity is proposed.

The approach enhances understanding of wettability effects on fluid flow and aids in history matching.

Abstract

The impact of wettability on the co-moving velocity of two-fluid flow in porous media is analyzed herein. The co-moving velocity, developed by Roy et al. (2022), is a novel representation of the flow behavior of two fluids through porous media. Our study aims to better understand the behavior of the co-moving velocity by analyzing simulation data under various wetting conditions. The simulations were conducted using the Lattice-Boltzmann color-fluid model and evaluated the relative permeability for different wetting conditions on the same rock. The analysis of the simulation data followed the methodology proposed by Roy et al. (2022) to reconstruct a constitutive equation for the co-moving velocity. Surprisingly, it was found that the coefficients of the constitutive equation were nearly the same for all wetting conditions. Based on these results, a simple approach was proposed to reconstruct the oil phase relative permeability using only the co-moving velocity relationship and water phase relative permeability. This proposed method provides new insights into the dependency of relative permeability curves, which has implications for the history matching of production data and solving the associated inverse problem. The research findings contribute to a better understanding of the impact of wettability on fluid flow in porous media and provide a practical approach for estimating relative permeability based on the co-moving velocity relationship, which has never been shown before.