A Robust Scaling Equation for Counter Current Imbibition in Naturally Fractured Gas Reservoirs

Spontaneous imbibition (SI) is an important mechanism in naturally fractured reservoirs. Efforts were made to study matrix-fracture interaction where matrix blocks are surrounded by water-filled fractures by developing the scaling groups. Despite previous studies on the scaling groups introduced to characterize the imbibition process in oil reservoirs, gas reservoirs have been less considered. In this paper, the impacts of different parameters on the SI in gas reservoirs were investigated and by inspectional analysis, a modified scaling equation based on the work of Ghaedi and Riazi (2016) was introduced for gas reservoirs. The proposed scaling equation includes a variety of fluid and rock parameters. [1], To compare the efficiency of the presented scaling equation, a realistic procedure was performed to simulate the imbibition process in several cases with considerable different fluid and rock properties. Comparison of the performance results of the new scaling equation for the defined cases showed much better accuracy for the imbibition scaling in the gas reservoirs with the proposed scaling group in this work.

Keywords:

Naturally fractured , Gas reservoir , Imbibition , Inspectional analysis , Scaling