Click to view complete article.

Heterogeneities Characterization of Carbonates: A ‘Multi-scale Challenge’

Cécile Pabian-Goyheneche
TOTAL SA, Pau, France

The geoscientists face significant technological challenges in characterizing, modeling and producing the carbonate reservoirs due to the genesis of carbonate rocks, their burial history and successive transformations (diagenesis). Those challenges centre on the tools and methodologies used for both studies and analyses, and concern all the players in the geoscience studies’ workflow. In the course of the operational studies for evaluating and optimising our reservoirs, geological heterogeneities, whatever their scale, have to be characterised, quantified and modeled, taking the associated uncertainties into account.

Carbonate reservoirs, originating from fossilized living beings and multiple paleo environmental contexts, reflect the full complexity of the processes that formed them: variety of sedimentary facies and of the fauna and flora within; diversity of the original climatic conditions and successive diagenetic events that have shaped them since early lithification and throughout burial. All of these phenomena contribute to their highly complex geology and intrinsic heterogeneity.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #120034©2012 AAPG Hedberg Conference Fundamental Controls on Flow in Carbonates, Saint-Cyr Sur Mer, Provence, France, July 8-13, 2012