A trial of correlating rock permeability to other petrophysical rock properties

Permeability of reservoir rocks is one of the most important petrophysical properties for reservoir description and simulation, but also it is not easy to be obtained during well drilling. On the other hand, other parameters such as porosity and fluid saturations are measured using various methods and techniques while and after drilling. However, measuring rock permeability and obtaining accurate values from cuttings can only be estimated using a pre-generated correlation between permeability and some other petrophysical rock properties such as porosity or liquid saturation which can be measured from cuttings. In this paper, I tried to correlate permeability, porosity and irreducible water saturation of some core samples retrieved from an oil well using different computerised methods. Firstly, using Microsoft excel, in this method different relationships were established by plotting permeability values against a combined parameters called ‘’V1 through V5’’ which represent different parameters formed of combining core porosity and irreducible water saturation values. This method managed to show that the best obtained value for the Coefficient of Multiple Determination (R2) was 0.9582 from correlating core permeability and parameter V4. The other method was done by using DataFit software which gave a direct relationship between the three core parameters which are permeability, porosity and irreducible water saturation. The accuracy of the obtained correlation from this method was very high; it showed that the Coefficient of Multiple Determination (R2) was 0.9998.