2.

6 Reservoir Properties
Hello and welcome back. Today I will tell you about reservoir properties. To
understand potential of an oil field, petroleum engineers need to understand,
estimate and analyse reservoir properties. Now I’m going to tell you about the
major ones.
As we already know, rocks capable of containing oil, gas and water which
can be extracted during field development, are called reservoir rocks. Most
reservoir rocks are of sedimentary origin.
Once again, there’s no such thing as an oil lake. Oil is contained in empty
spaces inside the rock, in pores and fractures.
Reservoir properties basically describe how good our rock is at storing
hydrocarbons and giving them away when needed.
The most important reservoir properties are porosity and permeability.
By definition, reservoir rocks must contain some void spaces that can hold
fluids. These spaces are called pores.
Porosity is the percentage of the volume occupied by pores to the gross
volume of the rock. Though, in engineering calculations porosity is expressed as a
decimal fraction.
Geologists distinguish between primary and secondary porosity.
Primary porosity is pore space that was created as the sediments were
deposited.
Secondary porosity is pore space that formed after the deposition, due to
such processes as dissolution, compression, and fracturing. Examples of secondary
porosity are caverns that formed after dissolution of lime grains by formation water
or due to partial dolomitization of carbonates.
It is quite obvious that with depth rock density increases, so the porosity
decreases.
For practical purposes, we also distinguish other types of porosity.
Total porosity is the ratio of the pore volume to the total volume of rock.
Open porosity is the volume of pores that are connected to each other.
 Effective porosity is the volume of pores through which fluid can flow in the
reservoir.
Porosity depends on the following major factors:
• Sorting (the better the sorting, the higher the porosity)
• Packing (the loosest, cubic packing gives us a 48% porosity, while the
densest, hexagonal one, only 27%)
• Grain shape (the more spherical, the higher the porosity)
• Grain contact (the less contact points, the better)
• Roundness (the higher, the better)
• Sedimentary environment and content of shaly material (the less shale, the
higher the porosity)
• Sediment cementation (the more cement, the less the porosity)
Please note that the porosity value does not tell us anything about grain size,
distribution and packing. Rocks with the same porosities may be quite different in
physical properties.
One more thing we need to understand is the fact that a rock with good
porosity will not necessarily be permeable for oil and gas. In other words, not
every porous rock can be reservoir. Besides porosity, it also needs permeability. So
what is it?
Permeability is the rock property which reflects its capacity to transmit
fluids; it determines how well liquids, gases and their mixtures will flow through
the formation.
The metric unit for permeability is a square meter, and the practical unit used
in petroleum industry is Darcy, named after Henry Darcy. It was Henry Darcy
who, a century and a half ago, came up with an empirical equation that is now
commonly used in the industry.
For his experiment, Darcy used a sand filter through which water was
flowing due to gravity forces. Pressure on the inlet and the outlet of this filter can
be calculated using h1 and h2 values.
This is what Darcy’s equation looks like:
 - flow rate
- pressure difference
- cross-sectional area
- fluid viscosity
- length
- permeability
Permeability is constant if the following conditions are observed:
• The flow is linear and straight
• Chemical reactions between rock and fluid do not occur
• All the pore space is occupied with a single fluid type
• The fluid is not compressible
Obviously, this is impossible in real life: we always deal with multiphase
flow (that is, flow of several fluids, or phases, at once), each phase flows at its own
speed, depending on various factors such as rock properties or phase saturation
distribution.
Same as porosity, permeability can be of several types: absolute, effective,
and relative.
Absolute, or physical permeability, is rock capacity to transmit a single fluid
measured when the formation is completely saturated with that fluid. It is measured
in laboratory conditions using air, gas or inert fluid, because unlike reservoir fluids,
these agents will not come in chemical reaction with the rock, altering its
properties.
Effective permeability is the capacity of rock saturated with water-oil-gas
mixtures to transmit a particular fluid separately. So, this is preferential
permeability for one fluid in presence of others. Effective permeability changes
constantly during field development. At the early stage of production, when pure
oil flows through the pores, effective permeability is the highest and closest to the
absolute one. Later, as reservoir pressure is dropping below the critical point, gas
that was dissolved in oil, starts coming out of the solution, reducing the effective
permeability for oil. When water comes into play, effective permeability for oil
gets even lower, which means that more oil will remain in the reservoir, and final
recovery factor will be lower.
Relative permeability is the ratio of effective permeability of a particular
fluid to absolute permeability.
Permeability of any rock depends most of all on pore sizes. The larger the
pores, the more the permeability. It also greatly depends on the tortuosity of fluid’s
route.
Secondary factors affecting permeability include:
• Grain size (the larger the grains, the larger the pores, the higher the
permeability)
• Roundness (the better, the higher)
• Grain shape (the more spherical, the higher the permeability)
• Sorting (the better, the higher)
• Packing (cubic packing gives the highest permeability)
Reservoir properties are learned from core analysis, geophysical surveys and
well testing. This is all for now see you.