From pore scale to wellbore scale: Impact of geometry on wormhole growth in carbonate acidization

Acid injection in carbonate reservoir is commonly used in the oil industry to improve, or at least recover, its productivity. The aim of this stimulation technique is to create empty channels called wormholes which, if successful, would bypass the damaged area near the wellbore. During production, wormholes become pathways for the reservoir oil to reach the well. This technique increases near-wellbore permeability, and therefore improves oil production. The interaction between the transport of acid, chemical reaction, and heterogeneities encountered at different scales, controls the unstable behaviour of wormholing and, thus, the success of the treatment. Most of the experimental and numerical studies done on this subject in the past have been limited in their observations because they only considered the dissolution process at a small scale (from pore scale to core scale). The purpose of this work is to study how the geometry of the domain can constrain wormhole competition, and influence wormholing dynamics in a core submitted to acidizing. After a short review of the literature on wormholing to see how the geometry effect could have influenced previous experiments, we study specifically the question of wormhole density. We emphasize that two mechanisms are involved in wormhole competition, with one of them being effective only at small scale. Thus we conclude that wormholing is not a full-scale independent process. We describe differences in the wormhole growth dynamics between confined and unconfined domains for different dissolution regimes. We focus on optimum conditions and their transition from confined to unconfined domain to realize that the flow rate in the dominant wormhole does not depend on geometric effects. We conclude by a comparison between 2D and 3D simulations, in both linear and radial flow, and observe changes in the wormholing process. All our results serve as a discussion about definitions of optimum conditions in the literature. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.