Thermal Conductivity Estimation Based on Well Logging

The thermal conductivity of a stratum is a key factor to study the deep temperature distribution and the thermal structure of the basin. A huge expense of core sampling from boreholes, especially in offshore areas, makes it expensive to directly test stratum samples. Therefore, the use of well logging (the gamma-ray, the neutron porosity, and the temperature) to estimate the thermal conductivity of the samples obtained from boreholes could be a good alternative. In this study, we measured the thermal conductivity of 72 samples obtained from an offshore area as references. When the stratum is considered to be a shale–sand–fluid model, the thermal conductivity can be calculated based on the mixing models (the geometric mean and the square root mean). The contents of the shale and the sand were derived from the natural gamma-ray logs, and the content of the fluid (porosity) was derived from the neutron porosity logs. The temperature corrections of the thermal conductivity were performed for the solid component and the fluid component separately. By comparing with the measured data, the thermal conductivity predicted based on the square root model showed good consistency. This technique is low-cost and has great potential to be used as an application method to obtain the thermal conductivity for geothermal research.