Developing Consistent Relative Permeability and Capillary Pressure Models for Reservoir Simulation of CCS Projects

Abstract

AbstractWith the need for rapid growth of the CCS industry, practitioners will need to rely on modeling and simulation, rather than analogs, to further understanding. We cannot solely rely on the results from the handful of small CCS projects around the world as the subsurface characterization of these projects have not necessarily been worked to the same rigor as major oil and gas assets. Furthermore, new practitioners are entering the space who may not be as steeped in subsurface knowledge and development experience as oil and gas professionals. We decided, given our history and leadership in both special core analysis (SCAL) and reservoir simulation to aid in developing and managing major subsurface projects, that we are in a unique position to give guidance to the CCS industry in this nascent phase. Presented here are a workflow to generate simulation-ready saturation function inputs (relative permeability and capillary pressure) curves and guidance on expected ranges for Corey parameters. We show that inputting measured data directly into a reservoir simulator leads to optimistic, underprediction of CO2 plume size during and post-injection, which has consequences to business decisions such as land acquisition, land stewardship and monitoring, measuring, and verification (MMV) plans.