Abstract Steam-water capillary pressure is often either ignored or determined artificially in geothermal reservoir engineering. However steam-water capillary pressure plays an important role in geothermal reservoir performance and may not be substituted by air-water capillary pressure. To this end, preliminary mathematical models have been developed to calculate drainage and imbibition steam-wa...

This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE Program Committee following review of information contained in a proposal submitted by the author(s).

Non-Darcy behavior is important for describing fluid flow in porous media in situations where high velocity occurs. A criterion to identify the beginning of non-Darcy flow is needed. Two types of criteria, the Reynolds number and the Forchheimer number, have been used in the past for identifying the beginning of non-Darcy flow. Because each of these criteria has different versions of definition...

One of the main interests in petroleum geology and reservoir engineering is to quantify the porosity of reservoir beds as accurately as possible. A variety of direct measurements, including methods of mercury intrusion, helium injection and petrographic image analysis, have been developed; however, their application frequently yields equivocal results because these methods are different in theo...

We study capillary trapping in porous media using direct pore-scale simulation of two-phase flow on microCT images of a Berea sandstone and a sandpack. The trapped non-wetting phase saturations are predicted by solving the full Navier–Stokes equations using a volume-of-fluid based finite-volume framework to simulate primary drainage followed by water injection. Using these simulations, we analy...

We study theoretically and experimentally the mechanisms of nonlinear and nonequilibrium dynamics in geomaterials through dynamic acoustoelasticity testing. In the proposed theoretical formulation, the classical theory of nonlinear elasticity is extended to include the effects of conditioning. This formulation is adapted to the context of dynamic acoustoelasticity testing in which a low-frequen...

Several methodologies published in the literature can be used to construct realistic pore networks for simple rocks, whereas in complex pore geometry formations, as formed in tight reservoirs, such a construction still remains a challenge. A basic understanding of pore structure and topology is essential to overcome the challenges associated with the pore scale modeling of tight porous media. A...

[1] The coda of seismic waves consists of that part of the signal after the directly arriving phases. In a finite medium, or in one that is strongly heterogeneous, the coda is dominated by waves which have repeatedly sampled the medium. Small changes in a medium which may have no detectable influence on the first arrivals are amplified by this repeated sampling and may thus be detectable in the...