A New Method for Calculating Reservoir Core-Bound Water Saturation Using the Cast Thin Section

Abstract

The rock coring of the reservoir in the Bohai A field is difficult. The cores of the target section in the study area are loose, making it difficult to accurately measure the core-bound water saturation. The purpose of this research was to develop and validate a method for calculating a reservoir core-bound water saturation ratio using the cast thin section. First, pepper noise denoising and image enhancement were performed on the thin section by median filtering and gamma variation. Based on this, the enhanced sheet images were thresholded for segmentation by the two-dimensional OTSU algorithm, which automatically picked up the thin section pore-specific parameters. Then, the thin section image was equivalent to a capillary cross-section, while the thin film water fused to the pore surface was observed as bound water. For hydrophilic rocks with a strong homogeneity, the area of thin film water in the pore space of the sheet was divided by the total area of the pore space, which produced the bound water saturation. Next, the theoretical relationship between the film water thickness and the critical pore throat radius was derived based on the Young–Laplace equation. The bound water saturation of the rock was calculated by combining the pore perimeter and the area that was automatically picked up from the thin film for a given critical pore throat radius of the rock. Finally, 22 images of thin sections of sparse sandstone from the coring well section of the study area were image processed using the new method proposed in this paper, and the bound water saturation was calculated. The calculated results were compared with 22 NMR-bound water saturations and 11 semi-permeable baffle plate-bound water saturations in the same layer section. The results showed that the bound water saturation values calculated by the three methods produced consistent trends with absolute errors within 5%. The calculated results confirm the reliability of the method proposed in this paper. This method can effectively avoid the problem of the inaccurate results of core experiments due to the easy damage of sparse sandstone and provides a new idea for the accurate determination of the bound water saturation of sparse sandstone.