During reservoir model building, one encounters several stages where upscaling or averaging of petrophysical data is required; core plug data have to be compared to wireline measurements and wireline measurements are averaged to the scale of building-size reservoir grid cells. Simple averaging does not, in most cases, give representative values, since the property in question is very scale-dependent. This is especially true for permeability and permeability anisotropy (kv/kh).

For the case of a reservoir model of the Garn Formation (Middle Jurassic) in the Tyrihans Field, a simple geologically based upscaling method including the use of the SBEDe software package has been developed. Small-scale models of near well-bore geology are upscaled using single-phase flow simulation to obtain directional-dependent permeabilities for facies with different mud contents and style. The resulting kv/kh estimation curve has been implemented in the reservoir model by modelling Vshale as a continuous parameter and applying the function to derive upscaled horizontal and vertical permeability grids. Upscaled permeabilities were found to closely match the well test data. This approach gives a more realistic kv/kh ratio than traditional methods involving simple averaging, or arbitrary guesses, of vertical permeability.

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