Experimental determination of the effective pressure coefficients for Brazilian limestones and sandstones

Abstract

There are numerous efforts to obtain information about saturation and pressure changes due to reservoir production from time-lapse seismic data. In spite of some good examples existing on the literature, there are a lot of approximations behind those studies. Generally, it is assumed that the seismic properties are functions of saturation and differential pressure Pd (overburden minus fluid pressure). Actually, the stress that governs the seismic behavior is the effective stress Pef, which is not exactly equal to Pd. In fact it is equal to the overburden stress minus n times the fluid pressure. Such coefficient (n) is known as the effective stress coefficient. Sometimes, depending on the circumstances, it might be identified as the Biot-Willis coefficient taking into consideration the bulk modulus of the porous media. In this paper, laboratory results in a tentative to quantify the n values for Brazilian limestones and tight sands will be presented. It is important to point out, that is the first effort to perform this sort of measurements on Brazilian rocks. The results have shown that the mentioned approximations can introduce errors on pressure estimations from time-lapse data even for high porosity rocks. © 2009 Sociedade Brasileira de Geofísica.