RESEARCHERS STUDY NEW WAYS TO TEST OIL AND GAS RESERVOIRS
HOUGHTON, MI--Researchers at Michigan Tech will spend the next three years trying to devise the best possible way to use high quality seismic data to determine the value of the nation's oil and gas reservoirs. The project is being funded by a $700,000 grant from the Department of Energy.
"Reservoir characterization is increasingly dependent on high quality seismic data and the seismic attributes derived from it," said Principal Investigator Dr. Wayne Pennington, professor of geophysics at the Upper Michigan school. "in fact, more than 200 seismic attributes are in use by geoscientists performing reservoir characterization in the United States today."
The aim of the Michigan Tech project, said Pennington, is to improve the capability of reservoir characterization by providing a set of tested routines to relate measurements made at various scales to both the seismic scale and to useful reservoir properties.
"Seismic attributes provide us with clues about the nature of rock and the fluids in it," he explained. "What we want to do is refine current processes to make it easier and quicker for scientists to determine the real potential of oil and gas fields."
Pennington and his colleagues plan an approach that will apply rigorous physical principles, direct correlation with measurable reservoir qualities, and the testing of algorithms and software developed during this project. The study will include testing at three active domestic fields representing a variety of rock types, for which core samples, data logs and seismic data are available.
"Typically, an oil company might find a certain set of seismic attributes useful in a statistical sense, but not really know the physics that makes them useful," said Pennington. "We plan to investigate those physical properties that allow some attributes to be useful and others not."
Pennington said physical scaling of the properties that control seismic attributes will be treated by modeling from each scale (core, log, and seismic) to the others, using well developed theories and relationships. He said software will be developed and tested to enable this scaling to be performed easily, and those models that test out successfully in each environment will be developed further to provide a set of user-friendly routines for distribution. In the final year of the project, these models will be put to a test with a new data set that was not used to develop the routines.
Pennington said the project will benefit the domestic oil and gas industry by providing a unified set of routines for characterizing reservoirs and by publicly demonstrating their use in case studies.
"We expect the project to increase the total domestic recoverable reserves by 1) reducing the frequency with which false statistical correlations are accidentally applied to reservoir characterization, 2) enhancing the predictive capability of seismic interpretation, and 3) increasing the use of seismic data for reservoir management," he said.
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For more information, contact Wayne Pennington at 906-487-3573 or by email: [email protected].
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