Carbonate Reservoirs

The 2nd Edition of Carbonate Reservoirs aims to educate graduate students and industry professionals on the complexities of porosity evolution in carbonate reservoirs. In the intervening 12 years since the first edition, there have been numerous studies of value published that need to be recognized and incorporated in the topics discussed. A chapter on the impact of global tectonics and biological evolution on the carbonate system has been added to emphasize the effects of global earth processes and the changing nature of life on earth through Phanerozoic time on all aspects of the carbonate system. The centerpiece of this chapter—and easily the most important synthesis of carbonate concepts developed since the 2001 edition—is the discussion of the CATT hypothesis, an integrated global database bringing together stratigraphy, tectonics, global climate, oceanic geochemistry, carbonate platform characteristics, and biologic evolution in a common time framework. Another new chapter concerns naturally fractured carbonates, a subject of increasing importance, given recent technological developments in 3D seismic, reservoir modeling, and reservoir production techniques. Detailed porosity classifications schemes for easy comparison Overview of the carbonate sedimentologic system Case studies to blend theory and practice

An accessible resource, covering the fundamentals of carbonate reservoir engineering Includes discussions on how, where and why carbonate are formed, plus reviews of basic sedimentological and stratigraphic principles to explain carbonate platform characteristics and stratigraphic relationships Offers a new, genetic classification of carbonate porosity that is especially useful in predicting spatial distribution of pore networks.

F. Jerry Lucia, working in America’s main oil-rich state, has produced a work that goes after one of the holy grails of oil prospecting. One main target in petroleum recovery is the description of the three-dimensional distribution of petrophysical properties on the interwell scale in carbonate reservoirs. Doing so would improve performance predictions by means of fluid-flow computer simulations. Lucia’s book focuses on the improvement of geological, petrophysical, and geostatistical methods, describes the basic petrophysical properties, important geology parameters, and rock fabrics from cores, and discusses their spatial distribution. A closing chapter deals with reservoir models as an input into flow simulators.

The case history approach has an impressive record of success in a variety of disciplines. Collections of case histories, casebooks, are now widely used in all sorts of specialties other than in their familiar application to law and medicine. The case method had its formal beginning at Harvard in 1871 when Christopher Lagdell developed it as a means of teaching. It was so successful in teaching law that it was soon adopted in medical education, and the col lection of cases provided the raw material for research on various diseases. Subsequently, the case history approach spread to such varied fields as busi ness, psychology, management, and economics, and there are over 100 books in print that use this approach. The idea for a series of Casebooks in Earth Sciences grew from my ex perience in organizing and editing a collection of examples of one variety of sedimentary deposits. The project began as an effort to bring some order to a large number of descriptions of these deposits that were so varied in pre sentation and terminology that even specialists found them difficult to compare and analyze. Thus, from the beginning, it was evident that something more than a simple collection of papers was needed. Accordingly, the nearly fifty contributors worked together with George de Vries Klein and me to establish a standard format for presenting the case histories.

This book integrates those critical geologic aspects of reservoir formation and occurrence with engineering aspects of reservoirs, and presents a comprehensive treatment of the geometry, porosity and permeability evolution, and producing characteristics of carbonate reservoirs. The three major themes discussed are: • the geometry of carbonate reservoirs and relationship to original depositional facies distributions • the origin and types of porosity and permeability systems in carbonate reservoirs and their relationship to post-depositional diagenesis • the relationship between depositional and diagenetic facies and producing characteristics of carbonate reservoirs, and the synergistic geologic-engineering approach to the exploitation of carbonate reservoirs. The intention of the volume is to fully aquaint professional petroleum geologists and engineers with an integrated geologic and engineering approach to the subject. As such, it presents a unique critical appraisal of the complex parameters that affect the recovery of hydrocarbon resources from carbonate rocks. The book may also be used as a text in petroleum geology and engineering courses at the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the parameters and factors that cause heterogeneity in carbonate reservoirs, and examines how they interact with one another. It explores the various scales of heterogeneity, how they are caused, and how they can be minimized, as well as how the scales affect each other, providing practical examples in each chapter. The book concludes by discussing the effect of heterogeneity on petrophysical evaluations. As reducing heterogeneity is the only way to obtain accurate carbonate reservoir characteristics at the regional scale, the book offers an important reference guide for all geologists, engineers, and modelers working with subsurface data.

Reservoir management is an important topic in the oil industry today. Conferences, forums, short courses, and technical papers, written and attended by engineers, geologists, geophysicists, petrophysicists, and managers discuss various aspects of reservoir management. A critical component of reservoir management is the accurate characterization of the hydrocarbon asset, called reservoir characterization. The topic of this course is the process of sequence-stratigraphic interpretation and characterization of carbonate reservoirs. Because of the overwhelming mass of information most reservoir geoscientists keep up with either some aspects of sequence-stratigraphy, or some aspects of reservoir characterization, but typically not both. The authors believe that the two disciplines are so intimately related that the sequence framework should be considered a critical piece of the integrated puzzle.