ABSTRACT
A binary type permeability distribution with spatial autocorrelation is introduced to model the transition between shales and sand in a reservoir. The contrast between the two modal permeability values can be made realistically high, and the autocorrelation ranges can be made realistically large and anisotropic. A steady state, single phase flow simulation is run over a network whose block grids are informed from the previous permeability distribution. The resulting network effective permeabilities are plotted vs. the shale proportion and show that a power averaging process would yield a good estimate much more accurate than either the arithmetic average (power 1) or geometric average (power 0) traditionally used. Connections with percolation theory results are indicated.
