Using core to reduce risk and deliver added business value throughout field life: a carbonate reservoir focus
Authors: Matthews Anna 
Published: February 2023

The role of the subsurface team is to reduce technical risk and uncertainty associated with profile delivery, for both hydrocarbon production and the injection of water or gases, enabling confident reservoir management and investment decisions. Core is a key resource for delivering this objective, providing the only opportunity to directly observe and measure the reservoir rock. However, it is expensive to acquire and the decision to take new core should be clearly linked to a business objective.

A combination of depositional and diagenetic factors can result in carbonate reservoirs being highly heterogeneous, making them a challenge to find and develop. Core studies can significantly improve understanding of the controls on heterogeneity and its distribution within the subsurface, but to maximize value, they should be fully integrated with wireline logs, seismic and production or test data to predict likely reservoir behaviour. For example, thin (<1 m) high or low permeability zones can dominate production yet remain very subtle or undetectable in wireline log or seismic data alone.

During exploration and appraisal, sufficient data and knowledge are required to enable appraise/develop or walk-away decisions. Appropriate geological description of core material helps to establish original volumes in place, net-to-gross, depositional setting, age, reservoir architecture and large-scale flow zones. Core material can also help establish other key reservoir parameters such as saturation, reservoir fluids, seismic rock properties and geomechanical properties as well as influence decisions such as well design, development strategy and facility requirements. As a field is developed and production matures, reservoir behaviour may change and detail of the sedimentology, structure, diagenesis, baffles and thin heterolithic permeability zones may become more important. In carbonate reservoirs, this often requires the integration of existing legacy core or new core material and targeted surveillance data, such as injection and production logging tool (ILT/PLT) or saturation logs, to understand the stratigraphic, depositional and diagenetic controls on flow units and improve predictive capability. Moving a reservoir from natural depletion onto waterflood or enhanced oil recovery (EOR) may need more advanced core-based data from core flood experiments to deliver maximum value from the reservoir. New core material, or detailed review and new sampling of existing or analogue legacy core, may be required to understand complex rock–fluid interactions and the value that waterflood or EOR could bring to a development.

To maximize the value and insights gained from core, it is essential to use it throughout a field's life. High quality description and a well-considered sampling regime should be carried out at the earliest opportunity to provide baseline data. However, periodically revisiting the core enables the entire subsurface team to keep testing hypotheses and refreshing models. Where there is no core material available in the field, analogue field core can be especially useful both to narrow uncertainty and explore possible alternative models. A multi-disciplinary approach integrating new data with core observations helps refine and improve predictions and can lead to the identification of significant additional opportunities as reservoir behaviour matures and field development progresses.