Abstract

Rock physics serves as a useful tool for seismic reservoir characterization and monitoring by providing quantitative relationships between rock properties and seismic data. Rock physics models can predict effective moduli for reservoirs with different mineral components and pore fluids from well-log data. The distribution of reservoirs and fluids for the entire seismic volume can also be estimated from rock physics models. The first part of this report discusses the Voigt, Reuss, and Hashin-Shtrikman bounds for effective elastic moduli and the Gassmann fluid substitution. The second part reviews various contact models for moderate- to high-porosity sands. In the third part, constant-cement model, known to work well for the sand that gradually loses porosity with deteriorating sorting, was applied to the well-log data from an oil field in the North Sea. Lastly, the rock physics template constructed from the constant-cement model and the results from the prestack inversion of 2D seismic data were combined to predict the lithology and fluid types for the sand reservoir of this oil field.

Keywords rock physics modeling, seismic reservoir characterization, prestack inversion