Soil model for rock properties prediction in exploration settings

摘要

Pre-drill rock properties, pore pressure and reservoir quality are key factors to exploration success. Typical workflows are based on burial histories, stress evolution and thermal history of the basin and have been successfully deployed in most modern deltaic environments. However, for sands that have experienced complex stress histories, the conventional approach does not provide accurate predictions. Several authors have proposed pragmatic ways to capture the effect of lateral strain into the workflows. These soil-mechanics inspired approaches appear to provide a better estimate of rock and fluid properties than the conventional workflows but several questions regarding their validity remain unaddressed. We conducted several numerical experiments to evaluate the potential impact of complex stress histories on the compaction behavior of poorly consolidated sediments. We used different material models to predict the volumetric strains that develop along. K_0 consolidation paths. Based on the results, we evaluated the pragmatic stress modifier approaches that translate the three-dimensional in situ stress state into the one-dimensional stress input of the existing simulators.