The increasing oil prices and energy demands have pushed the exploration companies towards the search for complex reservoirs, in frontier areas and/or at greater depths. Under these circumstances, the characterization and modeling of such complex reservoirs cannot be adequately performed merely through the application of conventional seismic and log evaluation methods.

Detailed petrographic characterization and petrologic modeling are of key importance for the exploration for complex reservoirs through reservoir quality modeling at basin, oilfield or well scales, as for the optimization of hydrocarbon recovery during their production.

The petrographic characterization of petroleum reservoirs must include the depositional structures, grain types, size and selection, and the types, textures and location of diagenetic processes , constituents and pore types. These parameters strongly control the porosity and permeability of the reservoirs, as well as log and seismic signatures. Highly specialized knowledge is needed for the advanced petrographic description and quality modeling of complex reservoirs.

PETROLEDGE System is an intelligent database application created to support detailed petrographic analysis and petrologic interpretation of reservoirs, combining resources from relational databases and knowledge-based expert systems. Systematic description is facilitated by the use of flexible menus with standardized nomenclature and parameters, what radically reduces description time and errors.

An integrated electromechanical microscope stage allows an optimized modal quantification through point-counting, as well as the referencing of every point quantified and/or photographed in the thin sections.

The system provides compositional classifications, interpretations of tectonic provenance modes, diagenetic environments and sequences using Artificial Intelligence methods.

The intelligent database system allows the management, storage, recovery through multiple query, and the statistical and graphic processing of petrographic data, which are essential for the design of reservoir optimized recovery and quality prediction models.