Digital Rock Physics analysis of the Berea sandstone from synchrotron-based X-ray tomography
Abstract
The Berea sandstone is the dominant hyrdrocarbon reservoir rock in Kentucky, USA. This relatively homogeneous rock is made up predominantly of well-sorted and well-rounded quartz grains, with some minor quantities of feldspar, dolomite and clays. While the petroleum industry has widely used the Berea sandstone as a standard material in core analysis research and core flooding experiments, there are relatively few studies detailing the three dimensional microstructure of this rock. This research focuses on grain-scale, massively parallel, multiphase flow models using high resolution synchrotron microtomographic images of the Berea sandstone. In this work we present a systematic study of X-ray synchrotron micro-tomgraphic images of Berea sandstone containing one or more fluids and carbonate cement. We process and segment the images to segregate each phase by volume, and separate connected pore space from unconnected pore space. Analysis of these results indicate agreeable measurements of porosity and permeability that calibrate well with other laboratory based experiments. Using the extracted pore network we used the built-in fluid mechanics module in PerGeos to simulate single-phase flow through the pore space. Results from this modelling highlight the high velocity preferential flow pathways in our Berea sandstone sample. Our simulations indicate that the microstructure of the rock plays an important role in expanding the life of mature reservoirs, unconventional energy resources, and carbon capture and sequestration.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFMDI43A0345T
- Keywords:
-
- 0545 Modeling;
- COMPUTATIONAL GEOPHYSICS;
- 0560 Numerical solutions;
- COMPUTATIONAL GEOPHYSICS;
- 1932 High-performance computing;
- INFORMATICS;
- 3260 Inverse theory;
- MATHEMATICAL GEOPHYSICS