Home / Vol. 26 (2026)

Impact of Confining Pressure on Reservoir Permeability

H. Sbiga, N. Mousa

Petroleum Research Center, Tripoli, Libya

DOI: 10.68482/prj.2026.26.003 · Published Oct 2026 · Section: Petroleum Engineering · Pages: 26–36

Abstract

For conventional analysis of plug samples (porosity and permeability), the absolute and relative permeability that are measured on rock samples at ambient conditions (no overburden pressure), can lead to serious errors of estimating reserve, since a1l reservoirs are produced under confining formation pressure. Laboratory measurements were conducted on samples for two fields representing Libyan sandstone reservoirs to investigate absolute and relative permeabilities at ambient and at different confining stresses. In this study the permeability in the lower cretaceous of Nubian sandstone formation is braided fluvial reservoir and the measurement of permeability in this reservoir are variable from high to good and sometimes is very poor during the hole of reservoir based in laboratory routine measurement of permeability. Experimental data were collected from samples which were selected based on petrotyping technique named (GHE, s) to investigate the effect of confining stress to absolute (Klingenberg) and relative permeabilities. These experiments were conducted on sandstone rock samples (17 plugs) under net overburden pressures reach to (5000 psi). Our results show a decrease in permeability with increase in overburden pressure. Both correlations for the two fields are found to be polynomial. The relative permeability to water is a little reduced compared with oil relative permeability by applying confining stress. If the measurements are conducted at ambient conditions this may result in over or under estimation of fluid distribution in many situations in reservoir and the error in the estimation can subsequently lead to inaccurate estimates of the hydrocarbon in place.

Keywords

Absolute, Relative Permeability, Confining, Nubian, Coefficient

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