Evaluating Lacustrine Shale Oil Reservoirs by Integrating Reservoir Quality and Organic Matter Quality with Advanced Logging and Core Measurements

Abstract

Abstract Unconventional reservoirs oil and gas resources have great potential for development, especially in North America, which has been successfully achieved commercial production. Shale oil is one of the unconventional resources. Most of the shale oil reservoirs have complex lithology, poor petrophysical characteristics, complex pore structure, and so on, especially for lacustrine shale oil formation. This paper describes an approach and workflow to characterize the Chang7-3 member shale oil reservoir in the Ordos basin, China by integrating the high tech digital rock physics core analysis data with other special core analysis data to calibrate the reservoir petrophysical properties. The special unconventional core analysis method taken for this project are Tight Reservoir Analysis technology (TRA), Thin Section scanning (TS scanning), Mercury Injection Capillary Pressure test (MICP), N2 and CO2 Gas sorption test, XRD and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance analysis (NMR), and the new logging technology employed are gamma ray spectroscopy logging (LithoScanner*), nuclear magnetic resonance logging (CMR*), dielectric logging (ADT*). The new core analysis and logging technology not only depict the characters of the shale oil reservoir from microscopic to macroscopic scale, but also guarantee to establish the accurate method for reservoir identification and evaluation. The data analysis from above led to the development of evaluation models for organic matter quality and reservoir quality. Analysis of the production data revealed that the hydrocarbon abundance of the Chang7-3 member lacustrine shale oil reservoir is controlled by both organic matter quality and reservoir quality. A production forecast chart of Chang7-3 Member lacustrine shale oil reservoir was constructed based on the organic matter quality and reservoir quality. The application of the developed methodology and workflow achieved very good results and is supported by the test data from multiple wells drilled in the study area.