Factors influencing oil saturation and exploration fairways in the lower cretaceous Quantou Formation tight sandstones, Southern Songliao Basin, China

Abstract

Favorable exploration fairway prediction becomes crucial for efficient exploration and development of tight sandstone oil plays due to their relatively poor reservoir quality and strong heterogeneous oil saturation. In order to better understand the factors influencing oil saturation and favorable exploration fairway distribution, petrographic investigation, reservoir properties testing, X-ray diffraction analysis, oil saturation measurement, pressure-controlled mercury injection, and rate-controlled mercury injection were performed on a suite of tight reservoir from the fourth member of the Lower Cretaceous Quantou Formation (K1q4) in the southern Songliao Basin, China. The sandstone reservoirs are characterized by poor reservoir properties and low oil saturations. Reservoir properties between laboratory pressure conditions and in situ conditions are approximately the same, and oil saturations are not controlled by porosity and permeability obviously. Pores are mainly micro-scale, and throats are mainly nano-scale, forming micro- to nano-scale pore–throat system with effective connected pore–throat mainly less than 40%. Oil emplacement mainly occurs through the throats with average radius larger than 0.25 µm under original geological condition. Moreover, the samples with higher oil saturation show more scattered pore and throat distributions, but centered pore–throat radius ratio distribution. Pore–throat volume ratio about 2.3–3.0 is best for oil emplacement, forming high oil saturation. Quartz overgrowth, carbonate cements, and authigenic clays are the major diagenetic minerals. The reservoirs containing about 4–5% carbonate cements are most preferable for oil accumulation, and oil saturation increases with increasing of chlorite as well. The flow zone indicator is a reasonable parameter to predict favorable exploration targets in tight sandstone reservoirs. The reservoirs with flow zone indicator values larger than 0.05 can be regarded as favorable exploration targets in the K1q4 tight sandstones. According to the planar isoline of average flow zone indicator value, the favorable exploration targets mainly distribute in the delta plain distributary channel and deltaic front subaqueous distributary channel.