The Impact of Reservoir Conditions on the Measurement of Multiphase Flow Properties for CO2-brine Systems

Successful industrial scale carbon dioxide injection into deep saline aquifers will be dependent on the ability to model the flow of the fluid and to quantify the impact of various trapping mechanisms. The effectiveness of the models is in turn dependent on high quality laboratory measurements of basic multiphase flow properties such as relative permeability and residual trapping at reservoir conditions. At the same time there exists general uncertainty around the few existing published data on these properties for CO2-brine systems. In this study we present results from a newly constructed reservoir condition coreflooding and imaging laboratory designed to measure multiphase flow properties, capillary pressure, relative permeability and residual trapping at a range of reservoir conditions. The proper approach to measuring relative permeability for CO2-brine system is proposed and demonstrated. The changes in residual trapping correlated to pressure, temperature, brine salinity, interfacial tension, and contact angle are also reported. We also show with a combination of simulations of corefloods and experiments performed at various conditions that high precision results can be obtained for this system when the appropriate conditions are used.