Objective
The chance of discoveries in petroleum exploration relies on a good analysis of the petroleum system of the given area. The determination of the potential source rock, their maturity and their extension is among the tasks accomplished by the rapid screening of the rock samples with the Rock-Eval apparatus. Therefore this technique has been routinely used for around 15 years and has become a kind of standard for hydrocarbon exploration. In addition, the recent applications of this technique to production and to environmental sciences has noticeably extended the field of application of the technique. With the arrival on the market of the new Rock-Eval 6 and its added data, a new step has been accomplished.
For these tools to be routinely used in exploration, production and environment, it is nowadays an obligation that the data they generate are treated and interpreted rapidly in a user-friendly manner. This is particularly true for the latest product (Rock Eval 6) which commercial success relies on the fiability and quality of its associated "ROCKINT 6" software.
Therefore it is the objective of the "ROCKINT 6" project to demonstrate how this new software can help the Rock Eval users to handle rapidly their data, to control the quality of their data and to prepare a reliable synthesis of the petroleum potential of the geological formations analysed. The software introduces new interpretative parameters based on the CO and CO2 analysis as well as high temperature maturity indices that will be very helpful in complicated geological setting such as thrusted zones with deeply buried source-rocks or in the interpretation of pyrobitumes levels plugging the porosity of reservoir rocks. In addition, an improvement of the program lies into the integration of other geochemical data (such as vitrinite reflectance data, rock extract composition) and geological data (mineralogy, facies)
The results of this second phase of the project indicate that the vizualisation, with ROCKINT 6, of CO and CO2 traces has brought new ways of differentiating source rock facies within a series. The differences noted among the samples show different organisations of the oxygenated functions of the organic matter present in the source rocks (carboxylic acids, phenols, ethers, etc). Therefore changes of depositional environment, organic matter sources (continental versus lacustrine for instance) and/or alteration processes can be recorded. An other interesting result of this phase lies is the demonstration of the use of high temperature Tmax to assess maturity differences among overmature series from Venezuela. Finally, the automatic calculation of the transformation ratio (TR) has been tested successfully on marine and terrestrial source rock series.
The program handles very rapidly the data and has a high storing capacity. The data are screened through a quality control procedure that eliminates automatically the erroneous data and that gives an error diagnosis. Routine outputs are presented as tables, diagrams, geochemical logs,.. For these outputs, there is always a proposed set of "standard graphics" and numerous possibilities of combination of the output parameters by the user himself (well to well correlation of a specific parameter for example). Furthermore, a number of geochemical rules are introduced in the software to help the user in this interpretation of the data.
As a result of this work with "ROCKINT 6", the explorationist can calculate, within the petroleum system, the generative potential of the source-rocks, the amount of expelled hydrocarbons and the extension of the best horizons. For production applications, location and thicknesses of tar mat levels are easily determined thus allowing the calculation of non-moveable oils in a given oil column. In the environmental industry, the quantification (on-site or in the laboratory) of soil oil contamination is very rapid which can provide the industry with answers to how much soil has to be treated or to how deep a contamination has penetrated the ground.
The "ROCKINT 6" software is a Windows operating computer program written in C++ (object oriented programming). All the data obtained during the analysis of the samples with the Rock Eval 6 are collected by the software and are organized within an internal database. Numbers (values of the data) as well as alphanumeric characters (names of formations for example) are stored. Specific curves (S2, CO, CO2) are also acquired (200 points per curves) in order to work on the shape of the curves (form factors analysis) and to compute the kinetic parameters of the release of these products with another associated software (OPTKIN program).
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryorganic acids
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciences
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryhydrocarbons
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsfossil energypetroleum
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Call for proposal
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DEM - Demonstration contractsCoordinator
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