Tight Gas Sandstone Reservoirs Evaluation from Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Logs: Case Studies

Tight gas sandstone reservoirs parameters, such as porosity, permeability and initial water saturation, are difficult to be precisely estimated from conventional logs. What’s more, the effective gas-bearing formations cannot be directly identified either due to the characteristics of complicated pore structure, strong heterogeneity and high irreducible water saturation. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) logs, which are usually used to evaluate reservoir pore structure, are found to be effective in evaluating tight gas sandstone reservoirs. In this study, typical tight gas sandstone reservoirs of southwest China are used as examples; techniques of estimating porosity, permeability, initial water saturation and constructing pseudo-capillary pressure curve to quantitative evaluate tight sandstone reservoirs pore structure are studied. The acoustic and NMR logs are combined to calculate porosity. The technique proposed by Volokitin et al. (1999) is used to construct pseudo-capillary pressure curves from NMR logs. The saturation-height-function method is used to estimate initial water saturation, and the Swanson parameter based model is established to calculate permeability from constructed pseudo-capillary pressure curves. Comparisons of estimating porosity, permeability and water saturation with core-derived results illustrate that these techniques are effective in tight gas sands evaluation. Finally, the effective tight gas sands can be identified through combined use of the estimated reservoir parameters and constructed pseudo-capillary pressure curves from NMR logs, which is verified by the drill stem test data.