This book aims to develop the ideas from fundamentals of percolation theory to practical reservoir engineering applications. Through a focus on field scale applications of percolation concepts to reservoir engineering problems, it offers an approximation method to determine many important reservoir parameters, such as effective permeability and reservoir connectivity and the physical analysis of some reservoir engineering properties. Starring with the concept of percolation theory, it then develops into methods to simple geological systems like sand-bodies and fractures. The accuracy and efficiency of the percolation concept for these is explained and further extended to more complex realistic models.Percolation Theory in Reservoir Engineering primarily focuses on larger reservoir scale flow and demonstrates methods that can be used to estimate large scale properties and their uncertainty, crucial for major development and investment decisions in hydrocarbon recovery.

Many natural objects have been found to be fractal and fractal mathematics has been used to generate many beautiful ?nature? scenes. Fractal mathematics is used in image compression and for movies and is now becoming an engineering tool as well. This book describes the application of fractal mathematics to one engineering specialty ? reservoir engineering. This is the process of engineering the production of oil and gas. The reservoir engineer's job is to design and predict production from underground oil and gas reservoirs. The successful application of fractal mathematics to this engineering discipline should be of interest, not only to reservoir engineers, but to other engineers with their own potential applications as well. Geologists will find surprisingly good numerical descriptions of subsurface rock distributions. Physicists will be interested in the application of renormalization and percolation theory described in the book. Geophysicists will find the description of fluid flow scaling problems faced by the reservoir engineer similar to their problems of scaling the transport of acoustic signals.

This book discusses various aspects of percolation mechanics. It starts with the driving forces and driving modes and then examines in detail the steady state percolation of single-phase incompressible fluids, percolation law of natural gas and percolation of non-Newtonian fluids. Progressing from simple to complex concepts, it also analyzes Darcy’s law, providing a basis for the study of reservoir engineering, oil recovery engineering and reservoir numerical simulation. It serves as a textbook for undergraduate students majoring in petroleum engineering, petroleum geology and groundwater engineering, and offers a valuable reference guide for graduate students, researchers and technical engineers engaged in oil and gas exploration and development.

Percolation theory describes the effects of the connectivity of microscopic or small-scale elements of a complex medium to its macroscopic or large-scale properties. It also describes the conditions under which there may be a continuously connected path of local elements across the medium. The point at which the path is formed is called the percolation threshold. Percolation theory also predicts that many macroscopic properties of complex media follow universal power laws near the percolation threshold that are independent of many microscopic features of such media. There are many applications of percolation theory across the natural sciences, from porous materials, to composite solids, complex networks, and biological systems. This book presents the essential elements of percolation theory, covers the problem of calculating the exponents that characterize the power laws that the percolation quantities follow near the percolation threshold, provides a clear description of the geometry of percolation clusters of the connected paths, and addresses several variations of percolation theory. In particular, bootstrap percolation, explosive percolation, and invasion percolation are featured, which expand the range of natural systems to which percolation may be applicable. In addition, coverage includes several important applications of percolation theory to a range of phenomena, ranging from electrical conductivity, thermopower, the Hall effect, and photoconductivity of disordered semiconductors, to flow, transport and reaction in porous media, geochemistry, biology, and ecology.

The first edition of this book was published in 1994. Since then considerable progress has been made in both theoretical developments of percolation theory, and in its applications. The 2nd edition of this book is a response to such developments. Not only have all of the chapters of the 1st edition been completely rewritten, reorganized, and updated all the way to 2022, but also 8 new chapters have been added that describe extensive new applications, including biological materials, networks and graphs, directed percolation, earthquakes, geochemical processes, and large-scale real world problems, from spread of technology to ad-hoc mobile networks.

Over the past two decades percolation theory has been used to explain and model a wide variety of phenomena that are of industrial and scientific importance. Examples include characterization of porous materials and reservoir rocks, fracture patterns and earthquakes in rocks, calculation of effective transport properties of porous media permeability, conductivity, diffusivity, etc., groundwater flow, polymerization and gelation, biological evolution, galactic formation in the universe, spread of knowledge, and many others. Most of such applications have resulted in qualitative as well as quantitative predictions for the system of interest. This book attempts to describe in simple terms some of these applications, outline the results obtained so far, and provide further references for future reading.