A Three-Phase Relative Permeability Model for Heavy Oil Emulsion System

Chemical flooding is important and effective enhanced oil recovery processes are applied to improve the recovery of heavy oil reservoirs. Emulsification occurs during chemical flooding processes, forming an oil-in-water (O/W) emulsion system. In this work, the heavy oil emulsion system is characterized as a three-phase (continuous oil phase, dispersed oil phase, and continuous water phase) system. Based on a capillary tube model, a new relative permeability model is proposed to describe the flow of the emulsion system in porous media quantitatively, considering the physicochemical properties of emulsions and the properties of porous media. A resistance factor is derived in this model to describe the additional resistance to the emulsion flow caused by the interaction between dispersed oil droplets and the pore system. Three dimensionless numbers related to the emulsion porous flow process were proposed and their different effects on the three-phase relative permeability are investigated. To validate the reliability of the proposed model, a one-dimensional O/W emulsion-oil displacement experiment is simulated. The maximum absolute error between the simulated results and experimental data is no more than 10%, and the new model can be used to describe the flow behavior of heavy oil emulsions in porous media.