Practical Upscaling of Immiscible WAG Hysteresis Parameters from Core to Full Field Scale

Abstract

Immiscible water-alternating-gas (iWAG) flooding is often considered as a tertiary recovery technique in waterflooded or about-to-be waterflooded reservoirs to increase oil recovery due to better mobility control and potentially favorable hysteretic changes to phase relative permeabilities. In such cases, typically, reservoir simulation models already exist and have been calibrated, often modifying saturation functions during the history matching stage. However, to utilize such models in forecasting iWAG performance, additional parameters may be required. These can be acquired by simulation of WAG coreflood experiments. While in many published cases, the parameter values obtained from matching experimental results are used without modification, this may not be advisable since the parameters are only valid at the core scale at which they were obtained. This paper discusses the challenge of systematically upscaling WAG parameters obtained at core scale to an existing full field model. In this work, we use a multi-stage upscaling process from core scale to full field scale. The first stage uses a core scale model to match ‘representative’ core flood experiments and obtain WAG parameters. The second uses a well-to-well high-resolution 1D section of the full field model populated using gridblocks of core size to generate ‘reference’ WAG performance using the unaltered WAG parameters obtained from core. The third stage uses a similar 1D model but populated using gridblocks at full field model resolution to match the results from the reference model while adjusting the WAG parameters as little as possible. Finally, a model using the full field model resolution as well as the full field relative permeability functions which, it is assumed, have been tuned to match the history and account for dispersion is used to match the reference model results and obtain final upscaled WAG parameters. The upscaled WAG parameters obtained at the end of this multi-stage process can be used at the field scale. This process allows clear quantification of the uncertainty associated with the upscaling process. Simulations at the third stage showed that once the full field to core scale grid size ratio exceeded a certain point (2500:1), there was a marked increase in the difference between upscaled and reference model results. It was found that if WAG parameters were changed in the full field model resolution model in order to match recovery results in the reference model, Land's parameter could change by up to 10% and relative permeability reduction factor could increase by up to 30% although it is expected that this will vary from case to case. It is therefore recommended to identify and use full field model resolutions to as close to the threshold as possible. The practice of using the core scale iWAG parameters in the full field model directly could under-estimate actual recovery, and overestimate injectivity. When considering the WAG mechanism alone, the value of the recovery underestimate increasing with pore volumes injected and, in our case, by up to 7% after injecting 1 pore volume of fluid. This multi-stage simulation approach helps identify the adjustments required and uncertainties associated with simulating iWAG flooding in reservoir models. This approach utilizes options widely present in commercially available finite difference simulators, addresses the challenge of utilizing existing pseudo functions and provides a practical methodology through which iWAG performance forecasting can be improved.