New Correlations for Describing Oil Recovery from Generally-Wet Single Matrix Block in Porous Fractured Reservoirs

The fractured reservoirs are one of the important sources of oil and gas in the world. Imbibition process is known as a main production mechanism in these reservoirs where oil/gas filled matrix blocks are surrounded with water filled fractures. Different forces such as gravity and capillary play role in production from fractured reservoir during imbibition and this makes this process a complex one. In the previous works, Aronofsky model and Lambert’s W function were presented to model imbibition recovery from matrix blocks. The Aronofsky model underestimates early time recovery and overestimates late time and the Lambert’s W function is suitable for water wet cases. In this work, new correlations were developed with considerable amount of imbibition data at different conditions. The proposed correlations showed much better performance in predicting the imbibition recovery comparing with previous models. Furthermore, the presented models can predict oil and gas recovery in both of weakly water wet and strongly water wet cases.

Keywords:

Naturally fractured reservoirs , imbibition , matrix block , Aronofsky model.