Influence of Effective Stress on the Acoustic Velocity and Log-Derived Porosity

Abstract

Summary Experimental studies indicate that when effective stress increases, compressional wave velocity in porous rocks increases. Reservoir pressure reduction, resulting from hydrocarbon production, increases effective stress. For a rock with a given porosity the sonic log may show decreasing values as the pressure in the reservoir decreases. This in turn may lead to underestimation of the actual porosity of the reservoir rocks in low pressure reservoirs. The range of such underestimation for liquid saturated reservoirs may not be significant, but since the influence of effective stress on velocity increases as fluid saturation changes to gas, porosity underestimation by conventional velocity-porosity transforms for gas bearing rocks may increase. Examples are taken from partially depleted gas reservoirs in the Cooper basin, South Australia. The stress dependent nature of velocity requires that the in situ pressure condition should be considered when the sonic log is used to determine the porosity of gas producing reservoir rocks.