SPWLA Houston Westside Meeting

Upcoming Meeting:

REVISITING LOG-INJECT-LOG NMR FOR REMAINING OIL DETERMINATION: A FIELD APPLICATION OF T2-D NMR IN THE PERMIAN BASIN

by Emmanuel Toumelin, Chevron.

Westside Seminar
Date:  Wednesday, Feb 8, 2012
Lunch:  11:30   Talk:  12:00
Reservations: Email Thaimar Ramirez
RSVP before 3:00 P.M., Tuesday Feb 7th

Place:    BP Plaza Terrace Room on the 1st floor, next to cafeteria
501 Westlake Park Boulevard, Houston, TX 77079 (The BP complex tall green building closest to Memorial Drive) Click to see map.

Parking: Visitor parking at available at Westlake 1 and the building across Westlake 1 on Grisby Rd

Cost: Free
Lunch is not provided, bring your own or purchase in the BP cafeteria.

Sign In Process:
1) Sign in at the Terrace Room (no need to go to BP's main lobby)
2) Find your visitor badge at the Terrace Room and wear it during the meeting
3) Return badge to Thaimar Ramirez before leaving the meeting room

Abstract

As in many mature carbonate reservoirs, determination of remaining oil and oil-water contact in the Grayburg-San Andres dolomite formation at Vacuum Field (Permian Basin) is challenged by unknown salinity (due to decades of water flood) and variable electrical rock properties (due to the presence of anhydrite nodules, vugs, and possibly variable wettability). To address these shortcomings, a new protocol combining Log-Inject-Log (LIL) NMR and Relaxation-Diffusion (T2-D) NMR was tested to improve accuracy in remaining oil estimation. In classic LIL-NMR, manganese mud doping is used to decrease the T2 relaxation time of water between two successive NMR T2 log passes. The difference between the two NMR T2 logs is attributed to water, while the NMR signal remaining after doping is attributed to oil. However, it becomes very difficult to correctly differentiate oil from water if doping fails. Because oil signal develops along the D dimension in T2-D logging, while water does not, T2-D NMR makes it possible to identify whether mud doping was successful. In turn, unflushed oil saturation and wettability can be interpreted with more reliability, which was verified against sponge core measurements. Using only one T2-D NMR pass after manganese mud doping also alleviates the need for a pre-doping log pass. The new protocol therefore improves the quality control and simplifies the data acquisition of traditional LIL NMR method.

Bio

Emmanuel Toumelin

Emmanuel Toumelin is currently a research petrophysicist with Chevron Energy Technology Co. after more than 5 years in the Midcontinent/Alaska business unit. He holds an engineering degree from the Ecole Centrale de Lille and a PhD in petroleum engineering from the Univ. of Texas at Austin, where his graduate research work focused on the pore-scale modeling of NMR and electromagnetic rock measurements. He is an associate editor for Petrophysics and a technical editor for SPE and SEG journals. He received two SPWLA best-paper awards for fundamental pore-scale work on shaly-sand conductivity in 2006-2007, and was a 2010 SPWLA Distinguished Speaker.