A Numerical Study of the Critical Gas Saturation in a Porous Medium

We use pore‐network simulations to study the dependence of the critical gas saturation in solution‐gas drive processes on the geometric parameters of the porous medium. We show that for a variety of growth regimes (including global and local percolation, instantaneous and sequential nucleation, and mass‐transfer driven processes), the critical gas saturation, Sgc, follows a power‐law scaling with the final nucleation fraction (fraction of sites activated), fq. For 3‐D processes, this relation reads Sgc∼fq0.16, indicating a sensitive dependence of Sgc to fq at very small values of fq.