Calculation of Irreducible Water Saturation (S wirr) from NMR Logs in Tight Gas Sands

Abstract

It is difficult to calculate irreducible water saturation (S wirr) from nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) logs in tight gas sands due to the effect of diffusion relaxation on the NMR T 2 spectrum at present. By combining with classical Timur and Schlumberger—Doll Research (SDR) models, a novel model of calculating S wirr is derived. The advantage of this novel model is that S wirr can be calculated without a T 2 cutoff, and all input information can be acquired from NMR logs accurately. With the calibration of 36 core samples, which were drilled from Xujiahe Formation in Bao-jie region of Triassic, Sichuan basin, southwest China, the values of these statistic model parameters are defined. Field examples of tight gas sands show that the proposed model is reliable. The S wirr calculated with the proposed model match well with core analyzed results both in tight gas formations and water-saturated layers, the absolute error is in the range of ±4%. The calculated results by using 20.75 ms as the T 2 cutoff are accurate in water-saturated layers but are overestimated in gas-bearing intervals. Defining 33 ms as the T 2 cutoff is unusable both in gas-bearing and water layers.