Stress-velocity sensitivity in Gullfaks Brent reservoir sands

Anders Drge*, Anne-Kari Furre, Youness El Ouair, Statoil ASA

Summary
There is a general perception of core plugs having larger
stress sensitivity than in-situ stress sensitivity.
Measurements and estimations of the in-situ stress are
commonly considered complicated, and few studies have
proposed efficient strategies for the purpose. This paper
uses a well-measurement based method that estimates the
in-situ stress dependency of Brent reservoir sands in the
Gullfaks field. The results show porosity dependent
velocity increase for increasing net stress. The increase is
compared with stress dependency in core plugs taken from
the same sands.

Only P-wave velocities (Vp) are considered, due to lack of

shear-wave velocity (Vs) data. The velocity increase for
each Brent formation with increasing net stress is
presented, and the results are compared with core
measurements. Net stress is defined as the difference
between mean surrounding stress and pore pressure, and it
is normalized to the relevant in-situ stress state (5 MPa).
The mean of vertical stress and minimum horizontal stress
is defined as the mean surrounding stress. There are no
estimations of maximum horizontal stress, but the small
discrepancy between vertical and minimum horizontal
stresses supports the procedure.
Method

Introduction
The Gullfaks oil field is located in the Norwegian sector of
the northern North Sea. It is a structurally complex field
with sandstone reservoir units of Cretaceous to Triassic
age. The reservoir quality is generally very good, with
porosities in the range of 30-35% and permeability up to
several Darcys in the most important Brent Group
reservoir. Brent consists of five main formations; Broom,
Rannoch, Etive, Ness and Tarbert, of which the four last
named constitute reservoir sands at Gullfaks. The drainage
strategy is to maintain pressure with the use of both water
and gas injection. The last decade, increased oil recovery
(IOR) methods like time-lapse seismic have received a
strong focus. The baseline streamer survey was acquired in
1985, one year before production start. This survey was
repeated in 1996, 1999, 2003 and 2005. Three OBS surveys
were acquired in 2001, 2003 and 2005 in order to cover the
shadow areas of poor data coverage in the streamer data
around the existing installations.
The repeated (time-lapse) surveys are used for monitoring
fluid movement, identify bypassed reserves, provide
possible sites for infill drilling and to monitor pore pressure
changes. Since hydrocarbon production and injection alter
pore pressures, it is important to be able to separate
saturation and stress effects both in forward and inverse
seismic modelling (El Ouair and Strnen, 2006).
Stress sensitivity studies on core-plugs from the reservoir
sands have been performed, and shown significant velocity
increase with increasing effective stress (decreasing pore
pressure). But core studies rely on the assumptions that the
core is representative for the rock in situ, and that the
laboratory conditions are representative for the conditions
in situ. Limitations of core plug studies are well known
(e.g. MacBeth, 2004; Eiken and Tndel, 2005; Furre et al.
2007). This paper applies a strategy that enables stress
sensitivity analyses from in situ measurements in well logs.

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The method applied is described in detail by Furre et al.

(2007), and is based on well log data (porosity, saturation,
clay content, density, sonic (DT) logs and formation
pressure readings). In addition temperature and confining
stress were obtained from depth dependent relationships.
Modified Gassmann theory (Mavko et al., 2003) was used
to invert for dry compressional modulus. The FLAG
program based on Batzle and Wang (1992) equations was
used to account for pressure dependent fluid effects in the
inversion. The method utilizes the fact that even though all
logs are obtained prior to production in the specific well,
the majority of the Gullfaks production wells are drilled in
pressure depleted areas relative to initial (pre-production)
pore pressure, due to production from other wells. Since the
level of pressure depletion varies from well to well,
velocities in similar formations can be compared for
different pressure states, to find velocity sensitivity with
increasing net stress/decreasing pore pressure. Figure 1
illustrates the depletion states in the data used in this study.
Only sands with less than 15 % clay content are used, to
prevent that clay content becomes a significant parameter.
To minimize porosity effects, the sands are divided into
two porosity classes with approximately the same amount
of data in them; class 1: 30 34 % porosity, class 2: 34
40 % porosity.
Formation pressure logs are not continuously sampled, so
interpolation of existing measurements in each well was
necessary to enhance the database of this study, see Figure 2.
Filtering of extreme velocity data was necessary. Anomalous
velocities can be due to erroneous log data or deviating
mineralogy like calcite cement or coal, which is not registered
in the well logs used. The filter was defined to remove all
points that deviated more than the standard deviation from the
median velocity for a given net stress. This process removed
some of the upper and lower velocities. When analyzing the
results, the increase in net stress was defined in steps of 0.25

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Stress sensitivity in Gullfaks reservoir sands

Figure 1. Left: Net stress for undepleted formation (blue) and from
log recordings (black). Right: Pressure depletion in various wells.
The highest depletion seen in the wells is around 6.5 MPa.

Figure 2. Interpolation between formation pressure readings

(black stars) are performed to create continuous pressure logs
(grey line). Unless formation pressure readings indicate it,
interpolation over faults (red zigzag) and potential lithological
pressure barriers (black stippled) is omitted. Estimated
undepleted pore pressure is shown as a blue stippled line
while internal sands are marked with vertical white stippled
lines.
MPa, and all stresses are regressed to this sampling. Each
pressure depletion value is weighted equally, to avoid that the
large amount of data with low changes in net stress dominates
the whole trend.
Results
The sensitivity of dry P-wave velocity due to increasing net
stress is shown in Figure 3 for both porosity classes. A net
stress increase of 1 MPa entails a Vp increase of around 1.3
% and 0.25 %, respectively.
When looking at each individual Brent formation, the two
porosity classes are merged to increase the amount of data
and reduce dominating anomalies, see Figure 4. Two
different gradients are used to analyze the velocity-stress
trends; the least square (Lsq) gradient puts highest weight

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Figure 3. Stress sensitivity of dry P-wave velocities in

Gullfaks Brent sands. Above: Normalized dry velocity
increase with increasing net stress for porosities ranging
from 30 34 %. Below: Normalized dry velocity increase
for porosity values higher than 34 %..
on the data deviating most from the trend (L2 norm), while
the robust fit (L1 norm) in a higher degree ignores the
outlier velocities. The latter seems to best describe the
velocity dependence in this study, since anomalous high
velocities occur at low net stresses in some sands (Figure
4). This leads to a seemingly too low, and in one case even
negative, velocity gradient (Rannoch).
The core plug measurements are normalized to the in situ
net stress (5 MPa) in order to compare with the in situ
velocities, see Figure 5. The core sample data were fitted to
an exponential equation given by Furre (2002).
The figure indicates that the average velocity versus net
stress trend in the Brent reservoir sands are lower for both
class 1 and class 2 sands than in the core plugs. The core
plugs display large scatter for most sands, but all the
average core plug trends in the lower plot lie close to each
other.

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Stress sensitivity in Gullfaks reservoir sands

Class 1

Class 2

Figure 5. Comparison of core plug velocities and velocities from

individual sands (colored lines with superposed diamonds) and
average Brent sand trends for porosity class 1 (circles on red line)
and class 2 (stars on red line). The symbols elongate the velocity
trends from this study to higher stress-changes.

Discussion

Figure 4. Normalized stress sensitivity of individual Brent

sands.

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In order to compare stress fits from logs and laboratory

measurements, the data were normalized to 5 MPa, which
is approximately the expected net stress in the undepleted
reservoir sands. The choice of normalization stress
influences the final stress trends of the core plugs, but
enables a more realistic comparison with the reservoir
velocities than without normalizing. Net stress increase in
this study ranges from 0 - 3.5 MPa (Rannoch and Etive) to
0 - 6.5 MPa (Tarbert and Ness), which is far lower than the
net stresses exerted on the core plugs. Ideally the stress
range should have been larger to increase the effects of
stress changes relative to uncertainties in the study.

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Stress sensitivity in Gullfaks reservoir sands

The high stress dependence found in Etive sands might be
due to mineralogical effects like calcite cementing in some
of the samples with highest depletion, coal that lowers the
velocities in the samples with low depletion or a
combination of both. Etive is however the sand with fewest
log data, which might allow anomalous data to dominate
the seemingly very high stress dependency. For the Etive
and Rannoch sands, the maximum change in net stress is
3.5 MPa, which is probably close to a limit of detection.
When the average stress trends for all Brent sands are
studied, significant differences are observed between the
two porosity classes. Class 1 seems to follow the Rannoch
trend, while class 2 follows the Ness trend, although
Rannoch and Ness are approximately equally presented in
both classes. The well log data can not explain why the
velocities in the high porosity sands seemingly have lowest
net stress dependence, but it might be due to mineralogical
differences. Both class 1 and 2 trends give a lower stress
dependency than the core plugs, although the trend for class
1 is close to the core plug trends. The proximity might
partly be explained by a natural high stress dependency of
the very loose and unconsolidated high porosity reservoir
sand found in Gullfaks Brent sands. It can, however, be
difficult to perform high-stress measurements in dry cores
taken from such unconsolidated reservoirs. Therefore the
cores are taken from the low porosity and more
consolidated end members of the sands, averaging to a
porosity of 24.5 %. The low porosity can be due to calcite
cement, which stabilizes the rock and lowers stress
sensitivity. This hypothesis is supported by CT-scans
performed on the cores, which show heterogeneities and
scattered areas with densities sometimes approaching the
density of the solid phase (approximately 2.65 g/ccm).
Direct mineralogical analyses of the core plugs have
however not been performed.
The robust curve fitting commonly gives steeper velocitystress trends for the individual sands, but when the dataset
gets sufficiently large (e.g. for the whole Brent Group) the
trends are almost identical, see Figure 3.
Some factors might introduce uncertainties in the well log
data used in this study. To minimize invasion effects, only
wells with the same mud type are used, but no further
corrections for invasion effects were conducted. Intrinsic
anisotropy was neglected, since only relative clay-free
sandstones were used in the study. Therefore wells with
varying wellbore deviations (from vertical to horizontal)
were used. This might introduce varying stress conditions
along the wellbore (the measuring direction varies). There
is no information about these stress conditions, so mean
stress is used for all data as previously explained.
Figure 3 shows that even after filtering the data and
removal of shoulder points (samples that lie within one
meter of a shale), the scatter is significant. The well log
porosities range from 30 % to around 40 %. This interval
embraces ca 85 % of all log data in clean sands. The large

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difference between class 1 and class 2 trends indicates that

porosity-induced stress dependency might cause some of
the scatter. It is also important to stress the importance of
having a large database with data distributed along the
whole stress interval when estimating trends, since a large
variation of trends can arise when the dataset get small. The
velocity-stress trends are often considered to be
exponential, but for the small stress intervals and large
scatter in this study a linear trend is clearly the best
alternative.
Conclusions
Although some scatter in the data, the method used in this
paper can be a good and realistic alternative to core plug
measurements in established fields with good well
coverage worldwide. The robust curve fitting gave linear
increasing velocities with stress for all Brent sands. For the
whole Brent Group in Gullfaks, the highest stress
dependency was found for velocities in sands with
porosities ranging from 30 to 34 %. Sands with higher
porosities showed smaller velocity increase with increasing
net stress. Both trends were lower than the velocitystress
trends found in core plugs. These results can be applied to
provide a better basis for prediction and interpretation of
time-lapse seismic effects at the Gullfaks field, e.g. in
seismic modeling or inversion.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Statoil and the Gullfaks
partners Hydro and Petoro for accepting publication of the
results. Statoil colleague Inge Kaas is acknowledged for
helpful discussions and comments.

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EDITED REFERENCES
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SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts have been copy edited so that references provided with the online metadata for
each paper will achieve a high degree of linking to cited sources that appear on the Web.
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Leading Edge, 24, 12501254.
El Ouair, Y., and L. K. Strnen, 2006, Value creation from 4D seismic at the Gullfaks Field: Achievements and new challenges:
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Furre, A. K., 2002, The effective stress coefficient for wave velocities in saturated grain packs: 64th Annual Conference and
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Furre, A. K., M. Andersen, A. S. Moen, and R. K. Tnnessen, 2007, Sonic log derived pressure depletion predictions and
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