Improved Method to Identify Hydraulic Flow Units for Reservoir Characterization

Abouzar Mirzaei-Paiaman*, Hadi Saboorian-Jooybari, Peyman Pourafshary

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

69 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Identification of hydraulic flow units (HFUs) is an important part of reservoir characterization. Rock samples within a given HFU are expected to have the same mean hydraulic radius. We show that the famous reservoir quality index-flow zone indicator (RQI/FZI) technique and its recent modifications do not use the concept of mean hydraulic radius. Each predicted HFU by these methods may contain the samples with different pore structures, and further the rocks with similar structures may be distributed in more than one HFU. This makes the reservoir characterization very complicated and sometimes an erroneous process. An improved method, referred to as FZI star method (FZI*), is presented here using the base form of the Kozeny-Carmen (K-C) equation, opposed to RQI/FZI method which relies on the generalized form of the K-C equation, by proper consideration of the mean hydraulic radius concept. The presented method is verified using a large set of capillary pressure measurements.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)726-733
Number of pages8
JournalEnergy Technology
Volume3
Issue number7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 1 2015

Keywords

  • Capillary pressure
  • FZI star
  • Hydraulic flow unit
  • Kozeny-carmen equation
  • Mean hydraulic radius

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Energy

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