Petrophysics: A Practical Guide 1st Edition

Good

This short book is a rough draft that somehow found its way into print by a major academic publisher. If someone is trying to learn the material, as I was, it has too many flaws to be useful, and if someone knows the material, the book has too many inadequacies to be consulted. I stopped after going only a quarter of the way through the book.The book has three pages of references, but they are very infrequently encountered in the text. Perhaps the next draft would have inserted references into the narrative. Discussions often state that something can be done without the reader being informed how, or subsequent discussion (if any) of the topic in the book, or a reference that could be consulted.As an example, early in the book (page 15), an equation for HIIP is given and is followed by the statement, which terminates the section, “Often these same data are run through a Monte Carlo analysis to give a range of results; specific cases can then be selected from a representative distribution.” HIIP thus sounds pretty important, but no literature reference is given. It isn’t in the index, isn’t in a previous table of important abbreviations, and although it is illustrated in a figure, the author doesn’t bother to define HIIP in the text until the next numbered section. One factor in the equation for HIIP, FVF, is in the table of abbreviations but isn’t defined until 150 pages after it is introduced, where instead of a multiplier, it’s given as a divisor B or elsewhere as Bo. And no reference is given on the magnitude or means of estimating B/Bo/FVF.Speaking of references, in the three pages of references, there are only five within the decade (2006-2015) before the 2016 publication date of the book, and one of these is slides from a lecture. Petrophysics, as defined by the author, must be a very dormant discipline!The spontaneous potential log is covered in two pages of text plus a figure – far too telegraphic to be useful.Sample logs are represented by their heading and a very short section of borehole log. But, since almost none of the logs are annotated, there’s nothing to be learned from them other than what squiggly lines look like.There must have been neither a copy editor nor an external reader. Figure 2.3, which takes up much of a page, has all the information content and sophistication of a 12-year-old’s show-and-tell of “My Trip to the Oil Well”. Table 3.3 is reproduced in toto in the facing-page figure 3.9 - something that the most inexperienced of copy editors would have caught. Quantities are undefined - what is the dashed line in Figure 3.15? And mud weight in table A1.1 has the astounding property of 8.0 lb/g.Seek knowledge elsewhere. And Wiley – you owe your authors and their readers much, much better!