A pilot study was recently undertaken in order to evaluate a number of reservoir characterization and petrophysical parameters using Digital Rock Physics(DRP).The chosen core samples were part of a prolific,but mature oil producing carbonate reservoir, on-shore Abu Dhabi.A highly focused set of special core analysis(SCAL) data were acquired earlier on the core samples comprising different reservoir rock types of varying levels of heterogeneity,lithology,porosity,and absolute permeability.This set of measurements formed the baseline for our comparison study.Several of these reservoir core samples were then used in the DRP study to evaluate water-oil relative permeabilities,capillary pressures,Archie cementation exponents’m’,saturation exponents’n’,and elastic parameters such as compressional/shear wave velocities. The current paper presents a comparison between rock property evaluations from laboratory tests,which took over two years to complete,and the Digital Rock Physics study,which required only three months. The comparison demonstrated an overall satisfactory match between data obtained by DRP and laboratory tests.It was therefore concluded,that Digital Rock Physics has the potential to significantly improve the quality and timeliness of reservoir characterization studies because of the quick turnaround time characteristic for DRP studies and the quality of data it provides.
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