Strategies for overcoming linewidth limitations in quantitative petrophysical NMR measurements.

The simple pulse-acquire experiment has been used to evaluate the level of accuracy and precision achievable in NMR fluid saturation measurements for a range of rock core samples saturated with either brine or hydrocarbons. For a set of more than 70 cores measured at 0.66 T the mean error in the NMR measurement is only 0.35% porosity when the sample linewidths are less than 50 ppm. However, for a significant portion of cores, those with very broad NMR linewidths (> 50 ppm), difficulties associated with nonuniform excitation are encountered. The magnetic susceptibility difference between pore fluid and rock matrix translates into relatively broad NMR linewidths, and this feature of petrophysical samples is the major difficulty in performing quantitative NMR experiments. Numerical simulations are used to complement the experimental results in order to develop strategies for obtaining accurate NMR results with these difficult samples.