Microfluidic Investigation on the Seepage Mechanism and Development Strategy Optimization of Water/Gas Flooding in Carbonate Reservoirs

Carbonate reservoirs exhibit complex combinations of pores, fractures, and vugs, and their strong heterogeneity makes pore-scale displacement mechanisms and recovery enhancement difficult to predict. In this study, six microfluidic glass-etched models representative of pore-type, vuggy, and fracture-pore carbonate reservoirs were designed from cast thin sections of the S oilfield. Experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of different factors on microscopic displacement behavior and residual-oil distribution. The results show that microscopic residual oil in carbonate reservoirs mainly occurs as film flow, droplet flow, columnar flow, multi-pore flow, and cluster flow, with cluster flow dominating the late stage of development in all model types. Under waterflooding, pore-type reservoirs exhibit the most uniform sweep and the highest recovery factor (44.26%), whereas vuggy reservoirs readily develop preferential flow channels and show the lowest recovery factor (41.58%). For fracture-pore reservoirs, injection perpendicular to the fracture provides the best performance, and wider or denser fractures improve displacement efficiency. Compared with gas flooding, waterflooding increases recovery by 10.48% in pore-type reservoirs and by 16.44% in fracture-type reservoirs. High-rate waterflooding and mid-stage flow diversion further improve recovery by 9.05–10.87% and 17.12–19.63%, respectively. These results provide pore-scale evidence for optimizing development strategies for carbonate reservoirs.