Quantifying Gas Saturation with Pulsed Neutron Logging — An Innovative Approach

摘要

In reservoir surveillance, gas saturation is routinely monitored both in gas reservoirs for reservoir performance and in saturated oil reservoirs to prevent gas coning or to optimize infill drilling well placement. This article presents a new pulsed neutron (PN) technology and method that enables the quantitative monitoring of the gas saturation variations to address these reservoir management issues. One of the key features of the newly designed PN tool is its new type of lanthanum bromide (LaBr3) detectors, which have the best overall performance among the detectors used in the industry. Another important new feature is its array of five detectors working together to provide an optimized solution for the targeted reservoir. The extra-long spacing of the far detectors enables a larger volume of investigation that is more representative of the actual reservoir condition. The quantitative aspect of the measurement is achieved by using the ratios of the detector counts, so that the rock matrix effects are diminished, as opposed to the traditional sigma measurement, which can be influenced significantly by the rock matrix properties. This new tool and data interpretation methodology have been tested in both clastic and carbonate reservoirs with encouraging results. This article presents an overview of the technology and some field application examples.