International Journal of Petroleum and Gas Engineering ISSN 5675-0715 Vol. 3 (3), pp. 001-009, March, 2016. © International Scholars Journals
Review
Methods of water saturation estimation: Historical perspective
Andisheh Alimoradi1*, Ali Moradzadeh1 and Mohammad Reza Bakhtiari2,3
1Department of Mining, Petroleum and Geophysics Engineering, Shahrood University of Technology, Shahrood, Iran.
2Department of Petroleum Engineering, Amir Kabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
3National Iranian Oil Company, Exploration Directorate, Tehran, Iran.
Accepted 22 September, 2015
Abstract
One of the most important tasks in reservoir engineering is characterizing different parameters of the reservoir. Water saturation is a parameter which helps evaluating the volume of hydrocarbon in reservoirs. Determination of this parameter started from 1942 by integrating some well logs in clean sandstones. After that, many scientists introduced some equations to validate this procedure in shaly sands and carbonates. To treat the problem of dependency of water saturation estimation on core analysis in previous works, other scientists proposed using rock physics and arrived at improved models of water saturation estimation. More recently, interpreters have used seismic attributes to evaluate water saturation values directly or estimating proper rock physical properties such as shale volume which are useful in water saturation estimation process.
Key words: Characterizing, well log, water saturation, rock physics, seismic attribute.