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In oil-wet rocks, contact angle, , is greater than 90o and less

than 180o.

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Example:

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Example:
Waterflooding an oil reservoir in which the reservoir rock is
preferentially oil-wet
Gas injection in an oil- or water-wet oil reservoir
Pressure maintenance or gas cycling by gas injection in a
retrograde condensate reservoir

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Artifical cores were created with increasing concentrations of

organo-silanes to make the cores progressively more oil wet.
The USBM wettability number ranged from 0.649 (strongly
water wet) to -1.333 (strongly oil wet).
Lab work4 shows that a strongly water-wet system will have
breakthrough of water after most of the production of oil has
taken place, and very little production of oil will occur after
water breakthrough.
For oil-wet systems, water breakthrough occurs earlier in the
flood and production continues for a long period after water
breakthrough at a fairly constant water/oil production ratio.

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The above figure4 shows that the core can change its
wettability characteristics from water-wet to oil-wet after
immersion in oil for long times.
Under waterflooding, oil-wet rock will generally have lower
recovery than water-wet rock.

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Note that wettability measurements using core samples yield

an indication of wetting preference of the rock in the lab. Not
necessarily in the reservoir.
Knowing the wettability does not allow us to predict multiphase flow properties. We still need to know capillary pressure
and relative permeability in order to predict the multi-phase
properties.
However, knowing the wettability helps us
understand the reservoir and anticipate or explain its behavior.

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1. Amyx, J.W., Bass, D.M., and Whiting, R.L.: Petroleum

Reservoir Engineering, McGrow-Hill Book Company New
York, 1960.
2. Tiab, D. and Donaldson, E.C.: Petrophysics, Gulf Publishing
Company, Houston, TX. 1996.
3. Core Laboratories, Inc. A course in the fundamentals of
Core analysis, 1982.
4. Donaldson, E.C., Thomas, R.D., and Lorenz, P.B.:
Wettability Determination and Its Effect on Recovery
Efficiency, SPEJ (March 1969) 13-20.

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