Abstract
Employing digital rock physics (DRP) to study the petrophysical characteristics of tight sandstones is a challenging and problematic issue. The non-resolved individual pores (sub-resolved pores), which cannot be determined in micro x-ray Computed Tomography (μxCT) images, is the main reason for incorrect calculations of the petrophysical properties with DRP. We present a workflow to resolve the matter. We compute the porosity and permeability for the μxCT images of samples from tight sandstone. After that, we apply downsampling. For each downsampled model, the porosity has been calculated. Then, by approximation of the trendline into the porosity data, the porosity for an effective resolution of 0 μm per voxel (μm/vox), is estimated. Next, we calculate the bias to correct the computed permeability. The match between calculated parameters and lab measurements proves that the proposed workflow is a reliable approach for practical DRP applications. Further analysis shows that taking advantage of image processing for studies of tight porous media leads to more accurate results than using the conventional petrophysical models of tight resources to map the porosity to permeability.
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