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.

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.

It is a pleasure to be asked to write the foreword to this interesting new book. When Professor Bedrikovetsky first accepted my invitation to spend an extended sabbatical period in the Department of Mineral Resources Engineering at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, I hoped it would be a period of fruitful collaboration. This book, a short course and a variety of technical papers are tangible evidence of a successful stay in the UK. I am also pleased that Professor Bedrikovetsky acted on my suggestion to publish this book with Kluwer as part of the petroleum publications for which I am Series Editor. The book derives much of its origin from the unpublished Doctor of Science thesis which Professor Bedrikovetsky prepared in Russian while at the Gubkin Institute. The original DSc contained a number of discrete publications unified by an analytical mathematics approach to fluid flow in petroleum reservoirs. During his sabbatical stay at Imperial College, Professor Bedrikovetsky has refined and extended many of the chapters and has discussed each one with internationally recognised experts in the field. He received great encouragement and editorial advice from Dr Gren Rowan, who pioneered analytical methods in reservoir modelling at BP for many years.