Investigation of Efficiency Improvements During CO2 Injection in Hydraulically and Naturally Fractured Reservoirs Progress Report (open access)

Investigation of Efficiency Improvements During CO2 Injection in Hydraulically and Naturally Fractured Reservoirs Progress Report

The objective of this project is to perform unique laboratory experiments with artificial fractured cores (AFCs) and X-ray CT to examine the physical mechanisms of bypassing in HFR and NFR that eventually result in less efficient CO{sub 2} flooding in heterogeneous or fracture-dominated reservoirs. This report provides results of the second semi-annual technical progress report that consists of three different topics. In the first topic, laboratory experiments were performed on a Berea core to investigate the changes in rock properties and fluid flow under different stress-state conditions. A comparative study of different stress conditions was also conducted to analyze the effect of the various loading systems. The experimental results show that fracture permeability reduces significantly as the stress increases compared to matrix permeability. The hydrostatic and triaxial stresses have greater impacts on permeability reduction compared to applying stress in the uniaxial stress condition. Fracture flow dominates when the applied stress is less, however, the matrix flow rate increases as applied stress increases and dominates at high stress even if the fracture does not heal completely. In the second topic, the preliminary results of static imbibition experiments are presented as a precursor to image the saturation profiles using X-Ray CT scanner. …
Date: October 30, 2002
Creator: Schechter, David S.
System: The UNT Digital Library