Course Description

The presence of clay minerals and shale laminations strongly affects the physical properties of the reservoir rock and induce significant effects on the response of most logging tools; these perturbations often result in low resistivity/low contrast pay zones that can be significant hydrocarbon producers but are often overlooked. A properly designed analytical program (cores and logs) for the evaluation of shaly sands can add significant reserves in existing fields and can allow for the rapid identification of potential by-passed pay zones in exploration wells. This course covers the important and nontrivial problem of practical formation evaluation in shaly sand provinces. The course is practical, and participants are given laboratory and field problems to emphasize the instruction.
 

Course Goal

To enhance the participants’ knowledge, skills and abilities necessary to understand shaly sands.
 

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, participant will be able to:

• Determine the nature, volume and distribution of clay minerals and shales in shaly sands, and their impact on the analyses of cores and logs.
• Integrate petrographic, core and log data to significantly improve reservoir evaluation in shaly sands and other rock types containing significant amounts of microporosity.
• Bring order out of chaos on porosity-permeability cross-plots using rock typing.
• Evaluate effective and total porosity, fluid saturations and producibility of shaly sands using time-tested specific methods.
• Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of advanced logging tools for characterization of shaly sands.
• Scan a log quickly for possible hydrocarbon pay zones
• Evaluate QA/QC issues
• Apply borehole and environmental corrections
• Evaluate Ra’s and determine Ro, Rw, Rxo, Rt, porosities and permeabilities from the logs
• Calculate saturations (Archie or Shaly Sand)
• Evaluate hydrocarbon mobility.

Who Can Benefit

This training course was designed for Petrophysicists, geologists, geophysicists, engineers and explorationists involved in all phases of reservoir evaluation in shaly sand provinces.