Deepwater Reservoir Characterization: From Core Description to 3-D Facies Propagation and Reservoir Modeling

Chen, Jiajie ¹; Bastidas, Rodrigo ¹; Laguros, George ¹; Petro, David ¹; Scott, Erik ¹; Campion, Kirt ¹
(1)Marathon Oil Corporation, Houston, TX.

Deepwater depositional processes result in complicated patterns of facies distribution. The physical properties of the sediments retained in each facies have significant impact on reservoir quality, connectivity and flow deliverability. Therefore, properly describing the stratigraphic complexity, especially the architecture of various facies, is one of the key issues facing the geoscience community when tackling the tasks in reservoir characterization and modeling. This paper presents a new methodology in which a number of processes are built into an integrated workflow for facies analysis and reservoir modeling. These processes include outcrop analog and development of conceptual depositional models, whole core description and detailed facies recognition, Multi-Resolution Graph based Clustering (GRGC) analysis to group the detailed facies types into fewer number of facies associations, prediction of facies associations in uncored intervals, propagation of facies associations in 3D space, and distribution of facies-linked reservoir properties (net-to-gross, porosity, and so on) in the geological model. The paper also shows a case study in the Gulf of Mexico to delineate the workflow, and discusses some necessary details in topics related to facies analysis, grouping, and reservoir property distribution.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90135©2011 AAPG International Conference and Exhibition, Milan, Italy, 23-26 October 2011.