Carbonate Reservoir Characterization: Part 06
1. Whether naturally fractured carbonate reservoirs remain to be poor candidates for miscible CO2-flooding?
How about the advantages associated with the gravity effects and the opening of the vertical fracture systems?
2. To what extent, the concept of thermal expansion will be able help in mobilizing the oil from low-permeable rock-matrix into high-permeable fractures, during the operation of steam-flooding in a carbonate reservoir? Whether, steam drive will efficiently heat the low-permeable rock-matrix blocks by heat conduction, where, the viscosity of the stored oil gets reduced by heating (and in turn, thermal expansion moves the oil from matrix into fractures)?
Whether carbonates would get dissociated by the steam (release of CO2) under the reservoir pressure and temperature conditions with favorable effects?
3. To what extent, a pressure cycling steam recovery process (with imbibition and internal gas drive and/or steam flashing) could be used to recover heavy oil from a carbonate reservoir?
In such cases, whether, the heating by thermal conduction would remain to be efficient? If so, which of the following processes would remain to be sensitive – that would displace the oil into the fractures:
(a) thermal expansion;
(b) accelerated imbibition;
(c) gravity drainage;
(d) expansion by solution gas drive of oil from the rock-matrix during the blow-down phase?
4. To what extent, the presence of sediment-filled and unfilled paleocaves and caverns dictate the resulting porosity and permeability distribution in a karsted reservoir?
What will happen, if we have extreme vertical reservoir compartmentalization resulting from the presence of successive levels of cave or cavern systems that remain separated by impermeable host strata (that may serve as barriers to lateral fluid flow); and by having impermeable strata within individual cave or cavern level in the productive section?
5. To what extent, the presence of multi-porosity systems in productive zones (inter-particle pores in cave-filling breccias; matrix porosity in host carbonates; dissolution enlarged fractures and joints; and large, tortuous cavernous pores) – that lead to extreme variations in effective porosity and permeability – lead to the changes in internal pressure gradients (associated with the local fluid flow) and the overall reservoir performance?
Suresh Kumar Govindarajan
https://home.iitm.ac.in/gskumar/
https://iitm.irins.org/profile/61643
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