Improving carbonate reservoir characterization by applying rock typing methods: a case study from the Nam Con Son Basin, offshore Vietnam

Understanding the permeability-porosity relationships is the key to improving reservoir prediction and exploitation especially in carbonate reservoirs, which are known for their complex textural and diagenetic variation. Rock type classifications have long been proven to be an effective technique for establishing permeability- porosity relationships, enhance the capability to capture the various reservoir flow behavior and prediction for uncored reservoir zones. This study highlights some of those practical and theoretically-correct methods, such as Hydraulic Flow Unit (HFU); Global hydraulic element (GHE), Winland’s R35 method, Pittman method, Lucia method. They are proposed and tested for identification and characterization of the rock types using a database of 555 core plugs from the Miocene carbonate reservoir in the Nam Con Son basin. It is a large isolated carbonate build-up structure which were deposited within a shallow marine platform interior and are dominated by coral, red algal and foraminiferal packstones, wackestones and grainstones. Hydrocarbons in this reservoir have been found in the upper most part of the late Miocene formation. Conventional core data were first used to define and display the cross plot of permeability and porosity. Different charts and cutoff thresholds were used to classified, defined number of rock type and the linear and non-linear equations were established. The predicted core permeability was calculated using different methods and compared with the actual core permeability for each rock type. The predicted reservoir rock type and permeability predictions of HFU method was recognized to give better matching of measured core permeability with coefficient of more than 89%.