Gas and oil production from waterflood residual oil: effects of wettability and oil spreading characteristics

In the depressurisation of reservoirs already produced to water-flooded residual oil, solution gas is released when the reservoir pressure drops to below the bubble point. This gas becomes mobilised when the critical gas saturation has been reached. Additionally, the oil itself can become mobile from its residual state and can also be produced under suitable physical conditions. The critical gas saturation, the rate of saturation change, and the gas saturation remaining at the end of the depressurisation process (unrecoverable gas) are important parameters in determining the overall economic performance when depressurising a reservoir. In this, and previous work, we are demonstrating that these quantities depend additionally upon other factors which affect the fluid distribution and the rate of gas generation, particularly the surface and interfacial properties. For instance, earlier visual experiments in glass micromodels suggested that wettability and oil spreading coefficient could substantially influence both the value of the critical gas saturation and the growth pattern for the developing gas bubbles, and thus the gas flow. In order to confirm these observations and to provide quantitative data, further experiments in large sintered packs, with different matrix wettability and with oils having different spreading coefficients (e.g. oil spreading onto a gas-water interface), have been carried out and are reported here. These new experiments show that the magnitude of the critical gas saturation for a water-wet system is about the same irrespective of whether the oil is spreading or non-spreading, but it is much higher than for the oil-wet case. In addition, oil is also produced but the rate of production is dependent upon the rock wettability and the oil characteristics. We find that in a water-wet medium, for spreading oils, the physical form of the oil becomes transformed from being immobile ganglia into mobile oil films, which can then be transported by the gas. For non-spreading oils, oil has to be pushed out by the gas as discontinuous ganglia so less is oil produced. In contrast, in an oil-wet system, the oil phase already exists as a continuous film on the surface of the solid so that the generation of gas effectively expands the oil phase, enabling the oil to be produced in larger quantities even at lower gas saturations. These new experiments give further evidence that rock wettability has an important influence on the performance of gas production from residual oil. Additionally, significant amounts of oil may be recovered after waterflooding from the residual condition, which could have a beneficial impact on the economics of the depressurisation. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V All rights reserved.