Absolute Permeability 63 4.10 POROSITY AND PERMEABILITY RELATIONSHIPS There is no direct or fixed relationship between porosity and permeability; however, in order for a given rock to have some permeability, the necessary condition is obvi- ously that the rock has a nonzero porosity because permeability is a function of continuity of the pore space, whereas porosity basically signifies the availability of a pore space. One exception, however, is the purely theoretical relationship between porosity and permeability for the two end points; that is, when porosity is zero, per- meability is zero, and when porosity is 100%, permeability is infinite. Unfortunately, these two end points are insufficient to derive a generalized relationship between porosity and permeability. Qualitatively one can state that the higher the porosity, the greater the chance is for the likelihood of a higher permeability. However, an exception is the pumice rock, for example, which although having a very high porosity (completely isolated nonflow through pores) is not a good reservoir rock because pores are not interconnected, that is, ithas zero effective porosity.!° Tissot and Welte'” have stated that a certain relation- ship can be observed between porosity and permeability for clastic rocks, that is, an increase in porosity is paralleled by an increase in permeability. This is demonstrated by them using porosity-permeability bubble plots for sandstones of different geologi- cal ages from NW Germany, which merely indicates the bubbles moving in the direc- tion of increasing permeability when porosity increases. They also included a table for common reservoir rocks which shows porosities grouped in 10%-15%, 15%-20%, and 20%~25% range that have correspondingly increasing permeability ranges, that is, 1-10 mD, 10-100 mD, and 100-1000 mD. Sometimes, porosity permeability data are grouped according to the depositional environment, and the rock type to enhance the clarity of the clouded data points into some meaningful trend, such as different “best fits,” would be valid for particular rock types. An example of such plot(s) is shown in Altunbay et al.” for a Middle Eastern carbonate reservoir. In 1927, K@Zeny"* actually developed one of the most fundamental and popular correlations expressing permeability as a function of porosity and specific surface area, KOzeny’s correlation was based on the analogy between Darcy's law for flow in porous media and Poiseuille’s equation for flow through n number of capillary tubes: KAAP __ r‘AP <= 4.55) a (4.55) Solving for k yields nar? ea 4.56 8A (4.56) Now porosity of the capillary bundle can be defined as 2 = Pore volume _ nm7L i Bluk volume AL64 Petroleum Reservoir Rock and Fluid Properties where L is length of the capillary tube. From Equations 4.56 and 4.57, (4.58) further defining the specific surface area as Surface area _ n2nrL Pore volume nmtr*L 59) that gives 4.60) ing Equations 4.58 and 4.60, 1\o (8 a If for the constant %, Uk, is substituted, then k= 402) KS Equation 4.62 is the K@zeny equation, where &, is the K@Zeny constant, 4.11 PERMEABILITIES OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF ROCKS ‘The absolute permeability of reservoir rocks can cover a fairly wide range, for exam- ple, as low as 0.1 to as high as 1000 mD, the low permeabilities being typical of tight sands formations and chalks. As outlined earlier, reservoir rock permeability depends on a number of inherent factors such as grain shape and size, grain arrange- ‘ment, and clay cementation that can substantially vary from formation to formation obviously imparting wide-ranging absolute permeability values. In general, the quality of a hydrocarbon-bearing formation is judged according to its permeability. Formations having permeabilities greater than 250 mD are consid- ered very good; those having permeabilities less than I mD, typically found in chalk formations, are considered poor. However, classification of reservoir rocks on a scale of poor to very good is rather subjective and relative. For example, Levorsen” clas- sifies permeabilities of common reservoir rocks as 1-10 mD being fair, 10-100 mD being good, and 100-1000 mD being very good. Because for instance, reservoir rocks having permeabilities less than 1 mD, which are sometimes termed as right