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Theoretical Study on Rock-Electric Characteristics of Complex Shaly Sandstones and its Application to Reservoir Saturation Evaluation

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Abstract

The conductive model of complex shaly sandstones is used to describe the rock-electric characteristics, which is the key to reservoir saturation evaluation. At present, conductive models as a single factor are unable to accurately reflect the conductive property of complex shaly sandstones, which limits the evaluation precision of reservoir saturation. In this paper, by incorporating multiple factors of shale, pore structure, and conductive structure, a novel modified equivalent rock element model (MEREM) is developed to analyze the rock-electric characteristics and calculate the reservoir saturation in complex shaly sandstones. Our studies show that pore structure and shale significantly influence the conductive property of complex shaly sandstones. However, they have the opposite effect and may cancel out each other. Moreover, the conductive model presented here has achieved promising results in interpreting experimental data. Furthermore, the MEREM is extended to oil-bearing shaly sandstones, demonstrating that the rock resistivity at different saturation is sensitive to pore structure and shale. The MEREM is applied to predict the reservoir saturation, and the computed saturation is found to be well-matched with cores. Therefore, the proposed MEREM is good for interpreting rock-electric characteristics and the evaluation of reservoir saturation in complex shaly sandstones.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National 863 Program (Grant No.2006AA06Z214), Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.41476027), Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.41874164), and China National Petroleum Corporation Research Project (Grant No. 2011B-4000).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Lab of Marine Geology, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China

    He Meng & Tangyan Liu

  2. PetroChina Hangzhou Research Institute of Geology, 920 Xixi Road, Hangzhou, 310023, China

    He Meng, Yueming Ye, Cun Yang & Libao Wang

  3. State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir Geology and Exploitation, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, 610500, Sichuan, China

    Shiqiong Liu

Authors
  1. He Meng
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  2. Yueming Ye
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  3. Tangyan Liu
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  4. Shiqiong Liu
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  5. Cun Yang
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  6. Libao Wang
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Contributions

He Meng and Tangyan Liu contributed to the methodology; He Meng and Yueming Ye were involved in the derivation and test of the theoretical model; He Meng and Shiqiong Liu contributed to the writing—original draft preparation; Cun Yang and Libao Wang were involved in paper proofreading and editing; Tangyan Liu was involved in the supervision. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Tangyan Liu.

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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Meng, H., Ye, Y., Liu, T. et al. Theoretical Study on Rock-Electric Characteristics of Complex Shaly Sandstones and its Application to Reservoir Saturation Evaluation. Nat Resour Res 32, 795–811 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11053-022-10153-5

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