Rock Physics - Integrating Petrophysical, Geomechanical, and Seismic Measurements
Rock Physics is a key component in oil and gas exploration, development, and production. It combines concepts and principles from geology, geophysics, petrophysics, applied mathematics, and other disciplines. Rock physics provides the empirical relationships, understanding and theory to connect petrophysical, geomechanical and seismic data to the intrinsic properties of rocks, such as mineralogy, porosity, pore shapes, pore fluids, pore pressures, stresses and overall architecture, such as laminations and fractures. Rock physics is needed to optimize all imaging and reservoir characterization solutions based on geophysical data, and to such data to build mechanical earth models for solving geomechanical problems. Attendees will obtain an understanding of the sensitivity of elastic waves in the earth to mineralogy, porosity, pore shapes, pore fluids, pore pressures, stresses, and the anisotropy of the rock fabric resulting from the depositional and stress history of the rock, and how to use this understanding in quantitative interpretation of seismic data and in the construction of mechanical earth models. A variety of applications and real data examples is presented.