ABSTRACT
The application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology in petroleum exploration and characterization dates back to the early 1950s, leading to the development of the NMR logging tool in the early 1960s. However, the logging tool had many limitations and was eventually retired from use. It took the
7.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 126 7.2 NMR Relaxation in Porous Media ............................................................... 127 7.3 NMR Log Data Acquisition and Inversion ................................................... 128 7.4 Application of NMR Technology in Petroleum Exploration ........................ 129
7.4.1 Porosity Estimation ........................................................................... 130 7.4.2 Irreducible Water Determination ...................................................... 132 7.4.3 Permeability Prediction .................................................................... 133 7.4.4 Estimating Viscosity ......................................................................... 134
7.5 Outlook on the Future of NMR Technology for Oil Exploration and Characterization............................................................................................ 136
Acknowledgments .................................................................................................. 136 Glossary ................................................................................................................. 136 References .............................................................................................................. 137
petroleum industry nearly 40 years of continual efforts to develop cutting-edge NMR technology for upstream applications. Today, the petroleum industry uses NMR technology for hydrocarbon reserve estimation, production efficiency determination, and reservoir management. Such a wide variety of valuable information obtained using NMR technology has had a tremendous impact on and provided economic benefits to the petroleum industry. In this chapter, we will summarize how NMR technology is used today to study the properties of hydrocarbons and formation rocks, such as mineralogy-independent porosity, irreducible water saturation, permeability, and viscosities. The major applications of NMR technology in the petroleum industry will be briefly introduced and discussed with examples.
