Alan will share his recent LPS presentation about Saturation Permeability Revisited - 40 Years On

Abstract:

Join us to hear Alan share his recent LPS talk about Saturation Permeability Revisited - 40 Years On. This event will also be our AGM.

At the 1987 SPWLA Annual Symposium in London, Alan presented a paper entitled “Permeability Averaged Capillary Data: A Supplement to Log Analysis in Field Studies”. The basis of which was the discovery that, for a set of capillary data from several rock samples, at any applied value of capillary pressure there is a strong correlation between the permeability of each sample and its capillary saturation at that pressure.

Given the limited computational capabilities at that time (programmable handheld calculators) the saturation height function derived at that time, by sequential calculations, was relatively ungainly.

The relationship was adopted by Alan and used by a few others in subsequent years, however by the 1990’s and the advent of more robust computational capabilities (PC’s and more sophisticated software), a more elegant relationship was proposed, independently by other authors. This relationship has been used, extensively, by Alan in subsequent studies.

The fundamental empirical observation is that capillary saturations, and so in-situ reservoir saturations, are closely related to the permeability of the rock. This talk will investigate this relationship in greater depth, focussing on the impact of the capillary derived pore size distribution of the rock samples and will highlight that this feature is fundamental to, and provides the link between, both capillary behaviour and flow properties.

BIO: Alan Johnson is a semi-retired petrophysical consultant with Interactive Petrophysical Solutions (IPS). In recent years he worked with Harbour Energy plc looking at petrophysical aspects of several planned CO2 storage projects in the Southern North Sea. Until April 2016 he was Principal Petrophysicist with Shell UK in Aberdeen. Prior to joining Shell in 2001, he worked as an independent petrophysical consultant in the UK for several years following a 14-year career with Hamilton Oil (later BHP Petroleum) as a Senior Petrophysicist and Petroleum Engineering Supervisor based in London and Vietnam. He originally started his career as a petroleum engineer with Shell in 1974 with a degree in Physics from Aberdeen University; during this early phase of his career, he worked in Aberdeen, Abu Dhabi and The Hague, predominantly in petrophysics.

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