Reservoir Engineering
1. If connate water represents the water from fresh/marine sources that originally existed in sedimentary rocks as sediments were deposited before drilling, then, are they independent of the magnitude of water saturation that resides in the rock interstices or pores (pore-water/interstitial-water)?
Whether the changes in the chemical composition of water during its migration through reservoirs (dissolving minerals during the migration) would be of any significance to chemical-EOR/Low-Salinity-Water-Flooding?
2. Whether the capillary forces causing an oil/water transition zone which develops in the reservoir upon the replacement of a portion of connate water by hydrocarbons during the migration of oil into water bearing reservoirs – would always ensure:
(a) 100% connate water below the transition zone?
(b) connate water getting reduced to a residual saturation above the oil/water transition zone?
(c) To what extent, the distribution of oil and connate water becomes a function of pore surface wettability that influences the saturation @ which connate water becomes mobile; and whether, connate water is in the center of the pore space or it remains distributed on the pore wall and rock grain contacts?
(d) Even, if we assume that the amount of connate water associated with the formation of thin films remains negligible (much less than 1% of pore volume; or, under reservoir conditions the films are as thin as 1 nm);
how about the quantum of connate water which remains associated with pendular rings (when the thin films are near the grain contacts, where the adjacent grains touch, the films thicken; and at the grain contact, the intermolecular attraction causes the connate water to coalesce near the grain contacts forming pendular rings) for reservoirs with insignificant clays, where the water volume bound in the clays may not be greater than the water volume held as pendular rings?
3. Feasible to rule out both diffusion (mixing that occurs as a result of fluid contact) and dispersion (mixing that occurs as a result of the movement of bulk fluids) ‘completely’ during an immiscible displacement in a petroleum reservoir?
How about the convective or hydrodynamic dispersion resulting from differential advection; or, from density/viscous differences?
4. Feasible to capture
(a) the way, the residual saturation of oil denying the pore space to other fluids (water/gas);
(b) the way, oil alters the streamlines, pressure gradients and flow rates of water (and gas);
(c) the way, the flow path of an oil becoming increasingly tortuous until the oil phase becomes no longer continuous, upon decrease of oil saturation; and
(d) the way, the oil continuity getting disappearing, when the oil occupies isolated pore spaces and become immobile
@ laboratory-scale?
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