The pore-level mechanisms by which a crosslinked gel changes a porous medium's physical morphology and multiphase permeability are examined using relative permeabilities, pulse tracers, and micromodel visualization. Coreflood experiments indicate that to retain oil permeability while reducing water-permeability, the maintenance of oil-phase pathways after a gel treatment is crucial. However, because the gel changes the medium's morphology, the original pathways for oil are disrupted if the posttreatment fractional flow of water is nonzero. This redistribution of phases generally causes a loss of oil-phase permeability that cannot be regained under normal flow conditions.

Relative permeabilities during drainage are not affected significantly by the gel, but during secondary imbibition, the hysteresis in relative permeability is much more pronounced. Tracer experiments indicate the reason for this behavior is that the gel reduces the connectivity of the medium and the fluids distribute themselves more inefficiently, causing a large fraction of dead-end or isolated nonwetting-phase fluid to exist. These conclusions are particularly important for water-control applications where water saturation increases with time. The mechanism suggests that even if a gel exhibits preferential permeability reduction, the loss of absolute permeability and the shift in saturation can be highly damaging to the oil-phase permeability of a treated zone.