The Effect of Fracture Geometrics on Breakthrough Time in the Immiscible Displacement Process Through Strongly Oil Wet Fractured Porous Media: Experimental Investigation

Abstract

The immiscible process appears to be one of the first feasible methods for the extraction of oil reserves. However, there is a lack of fundamental understanding of how fracture geometrical characteristics control the efficiency of oil recovery in this type of enhanced oil recovery technique. In this article, a series of experiments were conducted whereby the distilled water displaced n-decane in strongly oil wet glass micro-models having different fracture geometries. Breakthrough time, as a function of injected pore volume of distilled water, was measured using image analysis of the provided pictures. It has been observed that when the fractures' length is increased, the breakthrough time is decreased. In contrast, when the orientation angle related to flow direction is increased, breakthrough time is increased. A correlation for linear flow in fractured media is generated, which represents the breakthrough time as a function of fracture length and its orientation. This correlation is validated by immiscible displacement tests on other fractured micro-models in which fracture geometrics were designed randomly.

Keywords:

• breakthrough time
• enhanced oil recovery
• fracture geometric
• glass micro-model
• immiscible process