Experimental and Numerical Modeling of Double Displacement Oil Recovery Process in Tight Fractured Carbonate Reservoirs

Abstract Waterflooding has been the most popular post-primary production approach for improving oil recovery. In fractured reservoirs with large structural relief, gas injection can produce much of the post-waterflood remaining oil by gravity drainage. Oil recovery by gas-invoked gravity drainage in waterflooded reservoirs is known as the double displacement process (DDP). One major reason, among many, is that the three-phase relative permeability residual oil saturation endpoint is generally smaller than the residual oil saturation endpoint for the water-oil displacement. Field data indicate that the DDP has been successful in single-porosity sandstone formations. Intuitively, one can expect that DDP should produce similar results in reservoirs with ample intercommoned vertical fractures, which is the objective of this work. With the aid of tests on tight reservoir cores from a major Middle East carbonate reservoir, this study focuses on evaluating the DDP in fractured carbonate reservoirs where the wettability ranges from neutral to oil-wet conditions. The scope of the study includes: (1) assessment of the DDP experimentally in fractured cores using a high-speed centrifuge, (2) simulating the experiments numerically, and (3) upscaling laboratory results to field applications. Results from water-oil gravity drainage tests followed by gas-oil gravity drainage in fractured and unfractured cores are presented. We also show numerical simulation results of matching the experiments using both transfer function and 2-D numerical simulation, and how results from our study can be used in field applications. Typical waterflood oil recovery from 0.1-md to 2-md fractured carbonate cores has been noted to be around 38% of the initial oil in place while incremental additional oil recovery for gas-oil gravity drainage is nearly as much as the recovery from water.