Reservoir Engineering
1. Whether the way, by which viscous, capillary and gravity forces consume energy from a petroleum reservoir; and eventually, the way, they produce fluid through the wellbore remain to be the same; or, remain to be significantly different during primary, secondary and tertiary recovery?
Whether the fluid mechanics of a petroleum reservoir correlating the relationship between energy and flow rate remain to be different in various stages of oil recovery?
2. In the first 5 – 10 m from production well (radially), to what extent, Darcy’s law would be able to describe linear relationship between flow rate and pressure difference in a petroleum reservoir?
Whether the flow in the first 5 m could be claimed to be in a laminar state, where any material point could be assumed to move smoothly in a straight line which remain to be parallel to the principle axis of a petroleum reservoir?
Would the fluid velocity would remain to be maximum @ center of the reservoir thickness, and, will it tend to remain to be minimum near the confining layers?
What are the possible consequences by treating Darcy’s law to remain to be the linear flow law in the first 5 m?
Is it that only weak inertial forces get introduced in the vicinity of production wells; or, the flow has a definite non-linear relationship between flow rate and pressure difference in the first 5 m?
And, is there a significant difference in the flow behavior (within first 5 m) between a sandstone and a carbonate reservoir?
3. What exactly is the difference between considering the cross sectional area of fluid flow (including both solid rock grains and the pore area on the cross section) within a petroleum reservoir
(a) when an area of linear flow regime is considered (width/height); and
(b) when an area of radial flow regime is considered (2*pi*radius*height)?
Can we afford to apply Darcy’s law in radial flow regime, where the flow is no more uniform?
4. Why do we still deal with Darcy flux that describes the flow rate passing through a unit cross sectional area of a petroleum reservoir, which is just an imaginary apparent flow velocity?
With real flow velocity representing the flow rate passing through a unit pore area, why are we not used to the concept of average velocity and what is the clandestine behind not bringing effective porosity into picture?
5. If Reynolds number pertaining to flow through a petroleum reservoir mostly remain to be lesser than 0.1 (1000 times lesser than the Re for blood flowing through the brain); then, why do we bother about the so called inertial forces at all?
Can’t we characterize the reservoir with viscous forces to be dominant always?
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