Anisotropy parameters estimate and rock physics analysis for the Barnett Shale

Abstract

The rock physics model is an important tool for the characterization of shale reservoirs. We propose an improved anisotropic rock physics model of shale by introducing clay lamination (CL) index as a modeling parameter in effective medium theories. The parameter CL describes the degree of preferred orientation in distributions of clay particles, which depends on deposition and diagenesis history and determines intrinsic anisotropy of shales. Those complicated parameters of sophisticated methods that are difficult to quantify are substituted by CL. The applications of the proposed rock physics method include the inversion for anisotropy parameters using log data and the construction of a rock physics template for the evaluation of the Barnett Shale reservoir. Results show reasonable agreement between the P-wave anisotropy parameter e inverted by the proposed method and those measured from core samples. The constructed rock physics templates are calibrated on well log data, and can be used for the evaluation of porosity, lithology, and brittleness index defined in terms of mineralogy and geomechanical properties of the Barnett Shale. The templates predict that the increase in clay content leads to the increase in Poisson's ratio and the decrease in Young's modulus on each line of constant porosity, which confirms the consistent and reveals quantitative relations of the two ways of defining the brittleness index. Different scenarios of mineralogy substitutions present the varied layout of constant lines on the templates.