Investigation of the carbonate rock permeability based on medical x-ray tomography images

The determination of Petrophysical rock properties has always been an important part of geological modeling and also is used in reservoir engineering studies. Permeability (k) is one of the most important properties of porous media which is the measure of a porous material to allow fluids to pass through it. Permeability can be determined from both experimental tests and numerical simulations. Numerical simulations should be performed on geometries determined from advanced imaging techniques. Digital rock physics (DRP) is an approach for studying rocks nondestructively. In this paper, 10 carbonate rock plugs from the oil fields in South-West of Iran were imaged by medical CT scan and the outputs were used for image processing and permeability determination. We evaluated the use of Navier-Stokes equations to perform fluid flow simulation through the pore spaces geometry. The permeability of the samples were calculated and compared with laboratory-derived values. The results indicated a trend between the permeability values reported by the laboratory and medical CT images with R2=90%.