Probing the influential factors of NMR T1–T2 spectra in the characterization of the kerogen by numerical simulation

Abstract The low field nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has been widely used to characterize the longitudinal and transversal relaxation ( T 1 – T 2 ) spectrum of unconventional resources such as shale gas and tight oil containing significant proportions of kerogen and bitumen. However, it requires exquisite design of the acquisition model and the inversion algorithm due to the fast relaxation nature of the kerogen and bitumen. A new direct two dimensional (2D) inversion algorithm combined the iterative truncated singular value decomposition (TSVD) and the Akaiake Information Criterion (AIC) is presented to perform the data inversion efficiently. The fluid component decomposition (FCD) is applied to construct the forward T 1 – T 2 model of the kerogen, and numerical simulations are conducted to investigate factors which may influence inversion results including echo spacing, recovery time series, signal to noise ratio (SNR), and the maximal iteration time. Results show that the T 2 component is heavily impaired by the echo spacing, whereas the T 1 component is influenced by the recovery time series but with limited effects. The inversion precision is greatly affected by the quality of the data. The inversed spectrum deviates from the model seriously when the SNR of the artificial noise is lower than 50, and the T 2 component is more sensitive to the noise than the T 1 component. What’s more, the maximal iteration time can also affect the inversion result, especially when the maximal iteration time is smaller than 500. Proper acquisition and inversion parameters for the characterization of the kerogen are obtained considering the precision and the computational cost.