High Resistivity High Water Saturation Addressing the Problem to Avoid Water Production

Belayim Land field is one of the oldest and largest oil fields in Egypt. It produces oil from many sandstone reservoirs. Oil is produced from 4-30 ohm-m resistivity in Belayim Formation, while to the contrary, in Rudeis Formation, 70–80 ohm-m resistivity is producing water. Rock characterization program was planned for Rudeis Formation using core material. It includes porosity, permeability, thin section description, SEM, wettability, relative permeability and capillary pressure by mercury injection to obtain pore throat size distribution. The wettability of the reservoir rock was determined by Amott method and proved to be strongly oil wet. The wettability controls the position of fluids within the pore network, where in oil-wet the water saturation distributed as poorly connected droplets within the macro-pores and filled the micro-pores. To simulate the saturation history of the reservoir, restored-state samples at irreducible water saturation were flooded with water to perform electrical resistivity measurements. Non-linear curves were obtained during the electrical resistivity measurements. Two saturation exponents (n) values were proposed to reflect the mechanism of forming continuous water film from the water droplets. The inflection point between the two (n) values was used to determine the resistivity cutoff below which water is produced. In addition, it represents the water saturation cutoff which was confirmed from the calculation of fractional flow of water from relative permeability measurements. The production data confirm the use of variable (n) to monitor the water saturation in oil-wet reservoirs.