Reservoir Characterization and History Matching with Uncertainty Quantification Using Ensemble-based Data Assimilation with Data Re-parameterization
Author: Mingliang Liu
Publisher:
Published: 2021
Total Pages: 153
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKReservoir characterization and history matching are essential steps in various subsurface applications, such as petroleum exploration and production and geological carbon sequestration, aiming to estimate the rock and fluid properties of the subsurface from geophysical measurements and borehole data. Mathematically, both tasks can be formulated as inverse problems, which attempt to find optimal earth models that are consistent with the true measurements. The objective of this dissertation is to develop a stochastic inversion method to improve the accuracy of predicted reservoir properties as well as quantification of the associated uncertainty by assimilating both the surface geophysical observations and the production data from borehole using Ensemble Smoother with Multiple Data Assimilation. To avoid the common phenomenon of ensemble collapse in which the model uncertainty would be underestimated, we propose to re-parameterize the high-dimensional geophysics data with data order reduction methods, for example, singular value decomposition and deep convolutional autoencoder, and then perform the models updating efficiently in the low-dimensional data space. We first apply the method to seismic and rock physics inversion for the joint estimation of elastic and petrophysical properties from the pre-stack seismic data. In the production or monitoring stage, we extend the proposed method to seismic history matching for the prediction of porosity and permeability models by integrating both the time-lapse seismic and production data. The proposed method is tested on synthetic examples and successfully applied in petroleum exploration and production and carbon dioxide sequestration.