Integrated Approach to building a Reservoir Rock Typing Scheme for Microporous Reservoirs

Abstract

Despite a greater shift by the hydrocarbon industry towards reserves held in micropores in carbonates (dominantly the intercrystalline space between microcrystals), scientific literature is not unified on its foundational tenets such as depositional origins and diagenetic pathways of the microcrystals. This has made microporosity distribution across reservoirs risky at best as the Reservoir Rock Types (RRT’s) cannot be accurately defined. To that end, we purpose to study the Early Cretaceous Qishn formation outcrops in Central Oman as a microporous analog to comparable microporous reservoirs with the goal of developing a robust Reservoir Rock Typing (RRT) scheme. Stratigraphic measurements and sampling of microporous zones will be performed on site. To build the RRT scheme, we hope to integrate a suite of techniques including petrographic (transmitted light microscopy, Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy (CLSM), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM)), geochemical (X-Ray Diffraction, trace element analysis, stable and clumped isotopes analyses) and petrophysical (Conventional Core Analysis (CCA) and X-Ray Computed Tomography (CT)). 3D photogrammetry will also be conducted to create Digital Outcrop Models (DOM) upon which the developed RRT scheme can be spatially distributed. The study has immediate use worldwide, especially North America and the Middle East, as several microporous reservoirs were formed in similar conditions to the Qishn formation (Volery et al., 2009). It also has a global agency as the RRT workflow proposed can be adapted to any comparable outcrop-to-reservoir analog.

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90351 © 2019 AAPG Foundation 2019 Grants-in-Aid Projects