Insight of in-situ porosity and compressibility of the GC 955 Gulf of Mexico hydrate reservoir

¹ Institute for Geophysics, The University of Texas at Austin, 78712 Texas, US
² Department of Geological Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, 78712 Texas US
³ Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, 78712 Texas, US
⁴ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tufts University, 02155 MA US

^* Corresponding author: yi.fang@utexas.edu

Abstract

We characterize the in-situ porosity and compressibility of a coarse-grained hydrate reservoir in Green Canyon Block 955 in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico by performing experiments both on a hydrate-bearing sandy silt pressure core and on the same reservoir material after reconstituting. Uniaxial consolidation experiments demonstrate a small difference in porosity between a reconstituted sandy silt sample (S_h = 0, n = ~ 0.38) and a hydrate-bearing sandy silt (S_h = 83%, n = 0.39-0.40) at in-situ effective stress (3.8 MPa). Both measured porosities generally agree with the in-situ porosity (~0.38 to 0.39) of the reservoir formation that was best-estimated from both LWD and calibrated PCATS densities. The compression index of pressure core at 3.8 MPa is ~ 0.05 to 0.1, slightly stiffer than reconstituted sandy silts (C_c = 0.11). This difference in porosity and compression behaviors between hydrate pressure cores and reconstituted material implies that (1) analysis of reconstituted sediments from hydrate-bearing pressure cores provides a simple and intuitive approach to understand some petrophysical components of the hydrate reservoir; and (2) the high-saturation hydrate in the pores of sediments makes the hydrate reservoir slightly less compressible, suggesting a non-contact-cementing hydrate morphology in the pressure core.