3D Modeling of Carbonate Rock Porous Media and Estimation of Petrophysical Parameters

Abstract

Pre-salt carbonate reservoirs are known by their huge heterogeneity and their porous system present a challenge regarding reservoir characterization, petrophysical parameters analysis and full understanding of fluid flow dynamics. Besides that, the cost of obtaining rock samples from the reservoir and the destructive nature of most experimental tests increase the interest in develop the concept of Digital Rock Physics (DRP); DRP is based on high resolution imaging and three-dimensional digitizing aiming to investigate and calculate the physical and fluid flow properties of the porous media. In this approach, this work uses X-Ray computed microtomography, digital reconstruction and image processing to achieve the 3D modeling of porous media and estimate petrophysical parameters of Pre-Salt lacustrine carbonate analog samples: coquinas from Morro do Chaves Formation, Northeast Brazil. Experimental data is used to validate the predictions. The results suggest that an important step in the rock digital reconstruction refers to the segmentation process and the high computational cost is a limiting factor to generate the porous media model in three dimensions. Despite this, the estimated physical properties are in good agreement with the previous measured experimental values and the generated 3D model will be widely used in numerical flow simulations in the next steps of this study.