Revealing the Nominal Water Saturation through Advanced Core Analysis Workflow: Case Studies from Offshore East Malaysia

This paper highlights the challenges in identifying hydrocarbon presence and computing representative water saturation particularly in silty, low mobility, thin lamination and high clay bound water reservoirs. The complexity is further compounded with inadequate pressure, sample and core data to ascertain the fluid type, contact and validating the reservoir properties. Major intervention in the data acquisition plan has been revoked to acquire fit-for-purpose data for field development derisking including well test and coring. With respect to saturation computation, advanced core analysis covering mercury injection, centrifuge capillary pressure and NMR analyses guided by the lab best practices were performed to validate the range of saturation input used for volumetrics calculation. Discussion on the results taken from different reservoir cycles and hence representing varying reservoir quality will be entailed to test the methodology robustness and capture the uncertainty in the workflow. Results are also integrated with geological findings from XRD, thin section and petrography analyses to validate the observations from the proposed methodology which can be replicated for future projects.