Feasibility Study for Monitoring Oil Recovery Using Full Waveform Acoustic Logs in Eastern Venezuela

Feasibility study for monitoring fluid flow through a reservoir can serve as a tool to understand how changes in fluids saturation, pressures and/or temperatures during production phase alter the elastic parameters of reservoir rocks. Those changes may be detected via seismic records at several production time windows. Previous works on this area involve measuring well cores elastics properties in the lab, limiting the method where core data is available. In this study, full waveform acoustic logs have been used to compute elastic properties of reservoir rocks. The use of this kind of log produces a more abundant set of elastic parameters over a broader depth interval, which better represents real conditions of the reservoir. Those data along with the fluid flow simulation model, were used to construct maps for the elastic properties in saturated media, via Gassman relationships and Biot theory. The methodology has been applied to the Santa Barbara field located at eastern Venezuela. The Santa Barbara field is a gas and oil productive field. The results have been compared favorably to those obtained in a previous work using only well core data