Understanding the physical and chemical nature of oil and natural gas reservoirs poses some of the greatest challenges to increasing the rate of economic hydrocarbon recovery.

A broad array of architectural characteristics contribute to the heterogeneity (rock properties that change with location in a formation) of oil and gas reservoirs: rock facies geometry, diagenetic alterations, fracturing, and stratigraphic and structural settings.

Other variations in the structure of reservoir rock that pose technical barriers include porosity, relative permeability, pore and pore throat morphology, capillary forces, and variations in miscibility and saturation.

Several of these variables often change between similar reservoirs within a single geologic play; they also can change due to dynamic alterations of time and space that occur within a reservoir throughout the drilling and production processes.

NETL supports research to quantify the interrelationships of the components of reservoir rock architecture and the interactions of various fluids, fluids and rock, and fluids and gases at different scales.

The success of these research efforts bodes well for increasing the productivity of America’s oil and gas wells. Significant results have been accomplished, but many issues still are to be resolved.

NETL research has focused on reducing risk in low-permeability (“tight”) natural gas formations—an increasingly important source of America’s gas supply—by understanding rock-fluid characteristics in key Rocky Mountain basins.

In the area of enhanced oil recovery, NETL-supported research continues to investigate the issues of pore scale imaging, wettability and imbibition , and in-situ relative permeability.

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