A B S T R A C T Micropores can constitute up to 100% of the total porosity within carbonate-hosted hydrocarbon reservoirs, usually existing within micritic fabrics. Here, three-dimensional computational representations of end-point micritic fabrics are produced using a flexible, object-based algorithm to further our understanding of the contribution that micropores make to flow. By methodically altering model parameters, we explore the state space of microporous carbonates, quantifying single

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... d multiphase flow using lattice-Boltzmann and network models. In purely micritic fabrics, average pore radius (ranging from 0.26 to 0.44 μm) was found to have a positive correlation with single-phase permeability (1.7 to 2.7 md, respectively). Similarly, increasing average pore size resulted in decreasing residual oil saturation under both water-wet and 50% fractionally oil-wet states. Permeability was found to increase by an order of magnitude (from 0.6 to 7.5 md) within fabrics of varying total matrix porosity (from 18% to 35%) because of increasing pore size (0.37 to 0.56 μm, respectively), but minimal effect on multiphase flow was observed. Increased pore size due to micrite rounding notably increases permeability in comparison with original rhombic fabrics with the same porosity, but multiphase flow properties are unaffected. Andrew Curtis received a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1994. He has worked on mathematical and geophysical problems in seismology, imaging and inversion, and in geological expert elicitation. From 1997 to 2005, he was a senior then principal research scientist at Schlumberger Cambridge Research, and joined the University of Edinburgh in 2005. Since 2009, he has been a professor of mathematical geoscience.