A systematic investigation of drilling fluid bulk relaxation impact on NMR interpretation for formation evaluation

Abstract

During drilling, mud filtrate invasion alters near-wellbore properties which possibly impacts well logging measurements causing inaccuracies in formation evaluation. Given the shallow detection depth of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) logging, the transverse relaxation time (T₂) spectrum is highly susceptible to invasion effects. However, the impact of drilling fluid bulk relaxation on NMR T₂ and formation damage remains underexplored. This study aims to investigate how drilling fluid bulk relaxation influences NMR T₂ relaxometry responses in the near-wellbore region. Two factors controlling the drilling fluid bulk relaxation were considered and systematically varied: (1) XC polymer concentrations and (2) perlite concentrations in the drilling fluid. We conducted NMR measurements before and after filtration experiments on both permeable and tight limestone samples to assess the influence of host rock properties on the results. The study shows that drilling fluid bulk relaxation significantly impacts T₂ values. Additives like XC polymer or barite lower T₂ bulk values, reducing the T₂ logarithmic mean by up to 90% especially in invaded macropores. The more notable impact in macropores is because they are more influenced by bulk relaxation mechanism compared to micropores. Rocks with larger pores experience greater reduction in T₂, while tight rocks, dominated by surface relaxation, show mineral changes. The findings underscore the importance of accounting for drilling fluid bulk relaxation in NMR interpretation to avoid overestimating formation damage and permeability reduction.

Keywords

NMR / Drilling fluid / Bulk relaxation / Particle invasion / Formation evaluation

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Fauzan Akomolafe: Writing-original draft, Visualization, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Ammar El-Husseiny: Writing-review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Conceptualization. Abdulrauf Adebayo: Writing-review & editing, Software, Resources. Mohamed Mahmoud: Writing-review & editing, Resources. Badr Bageri: Writing-review & editing, Resources, Methodology.

Availability of data and materials

Data will be made available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors express their sincere appreciation to the College of Petroleum Engineering and Geosciences (CPG) at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals for their generous support in sponsoring this research.

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