A study of petrophysical properties based on digital core technology: A case study of a porous carbonate reservoir in the overseas J Oilfield

Abstract

Developing overseas petroleum exploration and production businesses is a necessary way to guarantee the energy security in China. However, in evaluating overseas reservoirs or designing development plans, due to lack of the first-hand data, the pore structures and seepage mechanisms cannot be well understood and the evaluation effects are influenced. In this study, with the porous carbonate reservoir of the overseas J Oilfield as a case study, the digital core technology is proposed to analyze the pore structure and seepage mechanism. ①With the thin section images of different flow units as the input data, after preprocessing of the medium filtering and threshold segmentation, the digital cores are reconstructed based on the Markov Chain Monte Carlo numerical reconstruction algorithm. ②The bore throat distribution, pore throat connectivity and porosity of the digital cores are analyzed. ③The lattice Boltzmann method is adopted to perform a single phase and two phase oil-water flow simulation in the digital cores, and the absolute permeability and relative permeability curves are calculated based on the simulation results. The reconstructed three-dimensional digital core can describe the differential characteristics of the pore throat radius distribution and pore throat connectivity of porous carbonate rocks in different flow units. The digital core porosity is highly consistent with the porosity of thin section images, and the digital core permeability shows a good positive correlation with the core permeability, thus conforming to the flow unit of the real core. The relative permeability curves of oil-water two-phase flow simulation show differences in the two-phase seepage capacity of different flow units, which can be used as the input of numerical simulation and the estimation of reservoir recovery. The results of digital core analysis are consistent with the results of physical experiments, thus verifying the reliability of the digital core analysis technique. This study provides a new strategy for reservoir evaluation and seepage study in case of data insufficiency and is valuable for reservoir description and effective development.

Keywords

• porous carbonate reservoir
• digital core
• pore structure
• rock physics