Introduction to Digital Rock Physics

Characterizing accurately rock properties such as porosity, permeability and elastic modulus at core scale is critical at reservoir scale modeling for the oil industry.  In the last two decades, a technology known as Digital Rock Physics was introduced as a digital numerical approach to support standard core analysis experimental methods. DRP aims mainly to characterize rock properties at pore scale by acquiring rock samples using X-ray micro-tomography and implementing numerical simulation methods. This course will introduce and discuss the basics of digital calculation and simulation to predict rock properties from synthetic and real samples.

Course Objective

This course aims to introduce the main concepts of Digital Rock Physics technology. The course includes both theoretical aspects and practical exercises.

Learning Outcome

After this course, students should have a broad overview of Digital Rock Physics principles.

Those who are working in:

• ADNOC
• ENOC
• Oil & Gas companies

1. I. Introduction to basic concepts of Digital Rock Physics
   1. 1) Introduction to image acquisition techniques
   2. 2) Image processing techniques
2. II. Estimation of porosity from images
   1. 1) Estimation of pore size distribution
3. III. Estimation of permeability
   1. 1) Introduction to lattice Boltzmann method
   2. 2) Simulation and validation on synthetic and real data
4. IV. Estimation of elastic properties
5. V. Texture analysis and upscaling methods