HYDRAULIC FLOW UNITS

PROBLEMS IDENTIFICATION

Example
Find the size of the area sampled by a wellbore that has a six-inch radius, and drainage area 5 acres. Solution The resulting sampled area is less than a square foot (three to four parts in million). well log can penetrate the formation up to five feet (still fraction of a percent).

Sampling Technique
A seismic section expands the fraction of area sampled, but interpretation of seismic data (soft data) is less precise. The reliability of seismic interpretation can be improved when correlated with hard data such as core and well log measurements. The range of applicability of measured data depends on the sampling technique.

Scale & Sampling

ntegrating scales & flow units

All of the information collected at various scales must be integrated into a single, comprehensive, and consistent representation of the final reservoir model. Integration of data sounds like a difficult issue that is often referred to as the scale up problem.

ntegrating scales & flow units

Attempts to relate data from two different scales can be difficult. One way to integrate available data within the context of a big picture is to apply the flow unit concept.

Flow unit
The concept of flow units has been developed to integrate geological and engineering data into a system for reservoir description. A flow unit is a volume of the total reservoir rock within which geological and petrophysical properties that affect fluid flow are internally consistent and predictably different from properties of other rock volumes (i.e., flow

properties that define flow units

geologic
Texture Mineralogy Sedimentary structure Bedding contacts Permeability barriers

petrophysical Porosity Permeability Compressibility Fluid saturation

Reservoir characterization
Rock typing is a way of reservoir characterization that models reservoir hydraulically and geologically by subdividing it into layers for reservoir simulation.

Applications

Identification of fluid contacts . Estimating the original oil or gas in place . Predicting the petrophysical properties for wells that have not been cored .