Course format

The EAGE Interactive online short courses bring carefully selected courses of experienced instructors from industry and academia online to give participants the possibility to follow the latest education in geoscience and engineering remotely. The courses are designed to be easily digested over the course of two or three days. Participants will have the possibility to interact live with the instructor and ask questions.  

Course description

This carbonate reservoir characterization course focuses on the analysis of carbonate depositional textures and the subsequent diagenetic modifications as the main controls on the pore system evolution, heterogeneity and complexity. The intricate inter-relationship of the depositional and burial history can be unravelled to allow the prediction of reservoir facies, and hence, aid reconstruction and development of three-dimensional reservoir models. This course demonstrates the value of understanding pore system evolution as a part of large-scale volumetric assessments and the development of carbonate reservoirs.

Reservoir quality in carbonate successions is often defined by the storage capacity, flow potential (ie. porosity and permeability respectively, measurements that are often acquired during conventional core analysis) and connectivity of pores (recorded as the pore-throat radius distributions during special core analysis). The interplay between these quantifiable factors (including sample-scale heterogeneities) is inevitably linked to the original depositional characteristics of the carbonate sediments, together with their susceptibility to post-depositional diagenetic alteration, which results in the ultimately complex pore system. Therefore, the classification of individual pore types will be detailed in this course, with their primary depositional or secondary diagenetic origin being discussed in context with sedimentological and stratigraphic models in order to underpin their spatial relationships and potential connectivity. In addition, the characterization of micrite textures will be discussed to illustrate their impact on the microporosity, factors that are particularly important to consider in tight unconventional reservoirs.

The depositional controls on reservoir properties that will be taken into consideration in this course include the texture, grain size, clay and matrix content as well as the type and quantity of allochems. The relationship between dissolution processes that result in an enhancement of the pore system, cementation processes that reduce the pore volume and the resultant connectivity and fluid flow pathways will be assessed to constrain the dominant diagenetic controls on the reservoir properties. In addition to this, the process of dolomitisation will be scrutinised in order to determine if and how this process enhances and/or reduces reservoir properties.

Integrating the key controls on reservoir quality within the sedimentological framework enables the establishment of a conceptual reservoir architecture model, which can be used to assess and predict the vertical and lateral variations in porosity and permeability at the reservoir and/or field scale. This course outlines how to conceptually build a reservoir architecture model, which in turn can be used to aid reservoir modelling. 

This course will be accompanied by a series of in-class exercises, which will emphasize the integration of the various datasets, providing participants with experience in carbonate reservoir characterization.