Chapter One

Introduction
 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

1.1. Introduction

Lithological layers location and properties determination needs acquisition and interpretation of
well logs. Once cutting are pumped out to surface, a log can be drawn by hand to reflect
lithology, and in others cases they can be acquired by wireline logging tools lowered into the
well or coring. After that, interpretation can be carried out by hand, using established log
analysis formulae, or by computer using appropriate software.

Nowadays in the petroleum industry, formation evaluation is being used for many reasons, such
as a base to understand the geology of the wellbore at high resolution and also to estimate the
producible hydrocarbon reservoir. One of the most useful ways to perform a formation
evaluation is by use of well logs, because they can contain key information about the formation
sampled by different petrophysical measurements (William, et al., 2011).

Formation evaluation is still a challenge in many fields because of the complexity of the
reservoir environment subsequent diagenesis effect. Therefore, the identification and
understanding of such phenomena is important before any well evaluation. In recent years, newly
developed technology and software and considerable work has been done in order to deal with
this issue and minimize the uncertainties associated with the hydrocarbon presence perform the
economic evaluation.

Once formation evaluation is performed on the reservoir, it is crucial to pay attention to the
location of the possible reservoir zone in the drilled section, determination of fluid type (gas, oil,
water) present in the pore space, saturation level, and the mobility of the fluids across the
connected pore space of the rock. To better achieve such information it is important to have a
good understanding of porosity (total, primary, effective porosity), water saturation computation,
pay thickness and selection of cutoffs.The aim of this process is to economically establish the
existence of producible reservoirs. For that reason some aspects such as uncertainty analysis in
reservoir properties measurement are needed in order to understand and quantify potential risks,
that could impact in our hydrocarbon presence and consequently in wrong decisions being made
(Adams, 2005).

Interactive Petrophysics software, as a wellbore platform, can deal with both basic and advanced
formation evaluation and uncertainty analyses on all wellbore data types available. This allow

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the possibility to design your own petrophysical workflow to generate significant quick look
interpretations based on your knowledge, and brings all of your wellbore data on vastly intuitive
application to carry out analyses.

1.2. Well Log Tools Classification

The logging tools are basically classified based on many aspects. The following classification is
based on the tools mechanism:

1. Formation Fluid Indicators

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1.3. Importance of Logging Tools

Logging applications for petroleum engineering:

 Rock typing
 Identification of geological environment
 Reservoir fluid contact location
 Fracture detection
 Estimate of hydrocarbon in place
 Estimate of recoverable hydrocarbon
 Determination of water salinity
 Reservoir pressure determination
 Porosity/pore size distribution determination
 Reservoir quality mapping
 Inter-zone fluid communication probability

1.4. Petrophysical evaluation

The choices of tools for the evaluation program are usually made by the reservoir management
with recommendations from the petrophysicist. Cost and accuracy are usually highly correlated;
thus, the team’s choices quickly become one of finding the maximum allowable risk for the
minimum cost of the evaluation. Table (1.1) summarizes the typical evaluation program choices
and can be used on determination of various reservoir properties. This contains additional
information on the properties listed in the table.

 Layer thickness
 Lithology and rock type
 Porosity
 Oil, water and gas saturation
 Fluid identification and characterization
 Absolute permeability
 Fractional flow

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Table (1.1): Tool choice for reservoir property

1.5. Limitation

Standard wire line • Sensors are located at different points – can be confusing
logging • Need to do additional work in order to get it to work properly
• Depth matching problems
• If tools drop, then it will take very long to retrieve it ( by using wire line logging)

Measurement • Costly
while drilling • If tools drop, then it will take very long to retrieve it ( by using MWD )
• Takes several hours - weeks to obtain the information after borehole is drilled
• As a result, formation can be significantly altered, ESP fluid saturation, effective
porosity and relative permeability
Drill stem testing • Expensive
• Cannot measure from the bottom – the interval cannot be too low, has to be high
enough from the end of the well
• The intervals need to be specific
Mud logging • There can be a discrepancy between the times the rock was drilled to the time that
the rock reached the surface. Particularly true for deep wells

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1.6. Project Objectives

The aim of this study was to do the formation evaluation using petrophysical parameters from
wireline logs in order to determine lithology, porosity, permeability and fluid saturation and to
understand the importance of the uncertainty analysis on reservoir permeability and predict gas
recovery.

It is important to identify properly the lithology and the reservoir to allow an accurate
petrophysical calculation of porosity, water saturation and permeability