Microscale Modeling of Heavy Oil Rocks

Due to decline in conventional oil and gas reservoirs, heavy oil has recently become an important resource. In consequence of this demand, it is necessary to have a rock physical model considering the viscoelastic behavior of heavy oils. Such effective properties are modeled on microscale using numerical simulations. Heavy oil rock sample is represented by the realistic digital 3D model. To obtain the effective velocities of such a digital sample, we use the viscoelastic rotated staggered grid FD algorithm. Numerical experiments are performed for transmission and reflection. Synthetic data obtained from numerical simulations are compared with recently developed model of generalized Gassmann equations for porous media with a viscoleastic solid material filling the pore space. The results show a very good agreement and confirm the applicability of the new rock physics model proposed for the modeling of heavy oil rocks.