oa Key Characteristics of Three-Phase Oil Relative Permeability Formulations for Improved Oil Recovery Predictions

Some IOR techniques create regions of three-phase flow. However, three-phase oil relative permeabilities are not generally well characterized and so there may be considerable uncertainty in the estimation of incremental recoveries. None of the many three-phase oil relative permeability formulations appear to fit the data outstandingly over the whole range [1]. Agreement is unfortunately worst in the low oil saturation regime, which is the most important for IOR. In the absence of a good physical model, and as a preliminary step, key characteristics of threephase oil relative permeabilty formulations which interpolate between given two-phase data are considered. In this way we hope to encourage best practice by avoiding those with undesirable or unlikely characteristics. In order to illustrate these conclusions a numerical sensitivity study of the effect of different formulations on the incremental oil recovery from immiscible WAG is presented.