Determination of True Bed Thickness Using Folded Bed Model and Borehole Data

摘要

The true bed thickness (t) is the actual thickness of a given formation perpendicular to the bedding plane. The value of t depends on the angle and the direction of the dip of the measured formation, as well as the drift angle and azimuth of the borehole. The traditional methods to calculate the parameter t consider only the case of monoclinal beds but not the case of a folded bed, which will cause deviations when the bed dip on the top is different from that on the bottom. To avoid these deviations, this paper shows an approach to calculate the values of t using a folded bed model. The deviations for the monoclinal bed model are positively related to the bed dip, the dip difference and the deviated angle of the wells. A case study from the Cantarell oil field complex in the southern Gulf of Mexico (offshore Campeche) is used to test the folded bed method. The results indicate that this model can yield more uniform spatial change of the values of t, whereas the monoclinal bed model will overestimate the average value of t. Compared to the folded bed model, the maximum relative deviation of t from the monoclinal bed model reaches 22.3% and the maximum absolute deviation of t reaches 34.5 m.