An Experimental Investigation on Archie Parameters at Ambient and Overburden Condition of Iranian Clean Carbonate Reservoir Rock and Developing a new Formation Resistivity Model for Limestone and Dolomite Samples

Abstract

Electrical resistivity measurement is widely used to estimate porosity and water saturation. Archie equation is not easy to apply to carbonate rocks because formation parameters (a, m, n) are functions of changes in the pore geometry, clay content, tortuosity of the pores, as well as formation pressure. The Archie equation is also valid only when the rock is strongly water wet and clay free, which is not the case in carbonate rocks, therefore cannot be generalized over the entire carbonate reservoir, so the straightforward application of that in carbonate rocks has severe limitations. In this paper, we discuss a new method using saturation analysis data to derive the correct form of the Archie equation that can be applied to carbonate rocks. Correlations among resistivity, and porosity derived from 108 actual core data of 18 core samples (10 dolomite and 8 limestone samples) in 6 different overburden pressures. The generalized equations can then be applied to any carbonate formation with varied geometry and clay content. The results of this comparison showed that the new developed model gave the best accuracy with average absolute errors of 20.4% and 10.9% for dolomite and limestone samples respectively, while the other common models are ranked, according to their accuracy in the following order to be Humble, Archie, and Shell, with average absolute errors of 26.0%, 26.7%, and 32.6% respectively for dolomites samples and in order to be Archie, Humble, and Shell with average absolute errors of 12.2%, 22.3%, and 26.2% respectively for limestone samples. The advantages of this model is improving the accuracy of formation resistivity calculations by exerting the overburden pressure effect and specially usage of each formula for each mineral type.