Pore-Scale Network Modeling of Acidizing in Carbonate Reservoirs

Abstract:

Carbonate reservoirs represent a significant portion of global hydrocarbon reserves. Injecting strong acids around the wellbore of carbonate wells can significantly increase near-wellbore permeability. A pore-network model is developed to capture permeability response of carbonates to acid stimulation. A novel pore-scale mass-transfer coefficient and pore-merging criterion are developed using finite element simulations. Preliminary results are able to reproduce the expected trends in permeability increase and capture the gamut of different dissolution regimes. Future work will focus primarily on using advanced subdomain coupling techniques to simulate much larger domain sizes to investigate the effects of domain size and determine a representative elementary volume.