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

With the need for rapid growth of the CCS industry, practitioners will need to rely on modeling and simulation, rather than analogs, to further understanding. Saturation functions are some of the critical inputs in reservoir simulation to prediction the dynamic behavior of the CO2 migration in the subsurface. As estimates of CO2 plume size, during and post-injection, influence land acquisition and monitoring, measuring, and verification (MMV) plans, it is important to use high quality experimental data and to properly work up the data to be used in a reservoir simulator. The work presented here adapts the methodology that ExxonMobil developed for saturation function inputs for reservoir simulation of oil and gas production to CO2 injection into a saline brine aquifer. We also present guidance on expected ranges for relative permeability Corey exponents (Corey, 1954) for CO2/brine based on literature data the we processed using the methodology presented here. From our decades of experience of using reservoir simulation to make business decisions, this approach properly represents the displacement physics leading to more accurate performance prediction and history matches.