Core Analysis Using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

Core analysis is critical for oil and gas exploration and recovery. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) has been widely applied to the petroleum industry for many years, and NMR core analysis plays an important role in supporting borehole NMR formation evaluation and understanding the mechanisms of petrophysics and petrochemistry. It’s unfortunate, however, that there has been a lack of commented descriptions of the basic procedures for NMR rock core analysis in the literature, which has led to issues of comparability and repeatability of NMR measurements between different laboratories. In this paper, we present a brief guideline for NMR rock core analysis of conventional T2, T1, T1-T2, and D-T2 measurements. As an established procedure in daily laboratory work, NMR core analysis includes three sophisticated steps: rock sample preparation, an NMR experiment, and data analysis. The acquisition and saturation of rock samples are described, and corresponding solutions are also considered. Detailed NMR experimental measurements, data setting, and calibration are addressed. Laplace inversion for different NMR experiments and models for estimation of porosity, irreducible water, permeability, pore structure, and oil saturation are included. The aim of this paper is to try to standardize general NMR experiments for rock core analysis.