Calculation of Gas-Water Relative Permeability from Resitivity and the Comparison with Experimental Data

Abstract

Relative permeability can be measured directly and can be calculated from capillary pressure data. However the capillary pressure technique still requires experimental measurements which may be difficult in many cases. Steam-water flow in a porous medium is such a case in which there is significant mass transfer and phase transformation between steam and water as pressure changes. On the other hand, many resistivity data from both laboratory measurements and well logging are available. Papers on the relationship between resistivity and relative permeability have been few. To this end, a model was proposed to infer gas-water two-phase relative permeability from the resistivity data. The proposed model was verified using the experimental data of gas and water relative permeability measured in different rocks with different permeability ranging from 10 to 280 md. The results demonstrated that the proposed approach to calculating gas-water two-phase relative permeability from resistivity data works satisfactorily in the cases studied.