Finding Petroleum - Analysing rock samples: VSG and Hannover geophysics institute tie-up

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Analysing rock samples: VSG and Hannover geophysics institute tie-up

Thursday, December 01, 2011 in Exploration / Seismic

Visualization Sciences Group (VSG) of Mérignac, France, has announced a tie-up with the department of Petrophysics and Borehole Geophysics at the Leibniz Institute for Applied Geophysics (LIAG), to do high resolution imaging of physical rock samples, and use the data to get a better understanding of the subsurface.

By analysing a real rock sample, taken from a core, you can understand the rock's physical properties.

The data can be used to get a better understanding of the reservoir (when producing oil), or understand the subsurface better if you are planning to use it for carbon dioxide storage.

The data from the rock samples can be linked together with other data from the well.

The department of Petrophysics and Borehole Geophysics uses a high resolution micro-CT (nanotom 180, from GE Sensing & Inspection Technologies - phoenix|x-ray) to derive non-destructively 3D imaging data sets of conventional reservoir and highly complex porous rocks.

Voxel resolutions within the sub-micron range (600 - 800 nm) are feasible.

These high-resolution data sets are used for qualitative and quantitative petrophysical investigations and for numerical modeling purposes at the pore scale.

VSG suggests that its Avizo Fire software can be used to process the data.

The first step is to visualise the rock and identify the mineral phases.

The next step is to understand the pore space, evaluate the total porosity or just look at interconnected porosity.

The Avizo software offers a 'skeletonization module' which can be used to understand the geometry and topology of the pore spaces.

There are tools to work out porosity inhomogeneities, and pore space tortuosity.

Then you can do numerical modelling on the data, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), modelling the electrical properties, and nuclear magnetic resonance effects. you can use Avizo's "Wind" module to visualise the results from this.

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