New Role of Thermal Petrophusical Tehcnologies at Exploration, Prospecting and Development of Oil-gas Fields

Abstract

Summary New thermal petrophysical technologies, developed in 2014–2018, have been promptly implemented for solution of different problems in exploration, prospecting and development of hydrocarbon fields. During last few years vast measurements of rock thermal properties - thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, volumetric heat capacity, thermal anisotropy coefficient, coefficient of linear thermal expansion - have been performed with the new technologies on more than 30 000 core samples from 31 wells drilled in 26 oil-gas fields of heavy oil and unconventional reservoirs. Integration of the new thermophysical technologies with well logging methods and new established correlations of the thermal properties with other rock properties allowed us to improve essentially effectiveness of methods of thermal petrophysics and to extend areas of their applications in oil-gas industry. The developed technology of non- contact non-destructive continuous thermal core logging provides high-resolution recording variations of rock thermal properties with a spatial resolution of ~1 mm and is combined with following measurements of the thermal properties at formation temperatures up to 300 C. The new thermophysical technologies become particularly actual in conditions when significant multi-scale heterogeneity and anisotropy of rocks within many hydrocarbon fields reduce effectiveness of standard petrophysical logging methods due to their restricted spatial resolution.