A Fresh Look for Natural Fracture Characterization Using Advance Borehole Acoustics Techniques

A new workflow reliably characterizes natural fractures in the complex Sabinas basin in the North of Mexico, where image logs alone were unable to characterize fracture networks adequately. The new approach, which integrates the response of borehole images with advance dipole sonic tool measurments, directly impacts the decision criteria of producible intervals where the zones that produce are the zones with open fractures seeing not only by the borehole image if not as well the acoustic anisotropy and stoneley attenuation. A case study of two wells in the Sabinas basin shows how the methodology gives a quantitative way to better understand the fracture networks and fracture dynamics in naturally fractured reservoirs, establishing a novel criterion for fast decisions based on colored flags.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90142 © 2012 AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition, April 22-25, 2012, Long Beach, California