In situ Wettability Measurement in a Carbonate Reservoir Rock at High Temperature and Pressure

摘要

More than a trillion barrels of oil may be extracted from carbonate reservoirs in the Middle East. Oil recovery is known to be controlled by wettability (distribution of contact angles) that determines the pore-scale fluid configuration. However, these contact angles have not hitherto been measured in situ at reservoir conditions for reservoir rock that is saturated with formation brine and crude oil. We use high resolution X-ray imaging of a sample from a producing oil field to demonstrate that contact angles over a wide range are seen both above and below 90°. More than a million points of contact angle were measured after three pore volumes of formation brine flooding. The injected brine invades the center of the pores as a non-wetting phase leaving oil trapped in small pores and corners in connected layers. Pores that were filled with initial formation brine remained water-wet. On the other hand, surfaces that were in direct contact with crude oil during aging were altered to oil-wet. However, water-wet surfaces were also measured in pores that were filled with crude oil which suggests that water layers in small pores, crevices, and within rock surface roughness, which might be connected to brine in micro-porosity, could prevent the contact between surface active polar compounds in the crude oil and the rock surfaces preventing strong wettability change. The reservoir rock became mixed-wet with a mean contact angle of 106° ± 20° obtained from 1.36 million in situ contact angle values measured using an automated algorithm (AlRatrout et al., 2017) applied on segmented three-dimensional X-ray image. The three-dimensional images were acquired using a high resolution X-ray micro-tomography scanner. The wetting condition resulted in a large volume of oil (50.6%) being trapped with a distinctive morphology as rough sheet-like layers.