Validation/enhancement of the "Jones-Owens" technique for the prediction of permeability in low permeability gas sands

This work presents the validation and enhancement of existing correlations for estimating and predicting the permeability in low permeability gas sands. The "original" problem of predicting the corrected or "liquid equivalent" permeability has been under investigation since the early 1940s ?????? in particular, using the application of "gas slippage" theory to petrophysics by Klinkenberg. In the first part of this work, the viability of the Jones-Owens and Sampath-Keighin correlations for estimating the Klinkenberg-corrected (absolute) permeability from single-point, steady-state measurements were investigated. We also provide an update to these correlations using modern petrophysical data. In the second part of this work we proposed and validated a new "microflow" model for the evaluation of an equivalent liquid permeability from gas flow measurements. This work was based on a more detailed application of similar concepts employed by Klinkenberg. In fact, we obtained the Klinkenberg result as an approximate form of this result. A theoretical "microflow" result was given as a rational polynomial (i.e., a polynomial divided by a polynomial) in terms of the Knudsen number (ratio of the mean free path of the gas molecules to the characteristic flow length (typically the radius of the capillary)), and this result can be applied as an explicit correlation device, or as an implicit prediction model (presuming the model is tuned to a particular data set). The following contributions are derived from this work: ?????? Validation and extension of the correlations proposed by Jones-Owens and Sampath-Keighin for low permeability samples. ?????? Development and validation of a new "microflow" model which correctly represents the flow of gases in low permeability core samples. This model is also applied as a correlation for prediction of the equivalent liquid permeability in much the same fashion as the Klinkenberg model, although the new model is substantially more theoretical (and robust) as compared to the Klinkenberg correction model.