This hugely experienced author working in Texas, America’s main oil-rich state, has produced a work that goes after one of the holy grails of oil prospecting. One main target in petroleum recovery is the description of the three-dimensional distribution of petrophysical properties on the interwell scale in carbonate reservoirs. Doing so would improve performance predictions by means of fluid-flow computer simulations. Lucia’s book focuses on the improvement of geological, petrophysical, and geostatistical methods, describes the basic petrophysical properties, important geology parameters, and rock fabrics from cores, and discusses their spatial distribution. A closing chapter deals with reservoir models as an input into flow simulators. Not only does this book provide a hugely practical approach that uses geostatistical as well as petrophysical methods, it can also be used as course material to integrate geology, geophysics and engineering.

Jerry Lucia has spent 50 years researching and developing carbonate reservoirs, first for the Shell Oil Company and now with the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas in Austin. He has a long history of working in integrated teams of geologists, petrophysicists, reservoir engineers, and geophysicists. During that time he has been instrumental in developing a rock-based approach to carbonate reservoir characterization. That approach is the subject of this book.