4D Seismic History Matching Incorporating Unsupervised Learning
This work addresses reservoir management challenges for the oil and gas industry by improving history matching accuracy, though it is incremental as it combines existing techniques in a novel way.
The paper tackles the ill-posedness of reservoir history matching by integrating 4D seismic data with machine learning techniques, resulting in better production data matches and improved quantification of propagating waterfronts compared to traditional methods.
The work discussed and presented in this paper focuses on the history matching of reservoirs by integrating 4D seismic data into the inversion process using machine learning techniques. A new integrated scheme for the reconstruction of petrophysical properties with a modified Ensemble Smoother with Multiple Data Assimilation (ES-MDA) in a synthetic reservoir is proposed. The permeability field inside the reservoir is parametrised with an unsupervised learning approach, namely K-means with Singular Value Decomposition (K-SVD). This is combined with the Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) technique which is very typical for sparsity promoting regularisation schemes. Moreover, seismic attributes, in particular, acoustic impedance, are parametrised with the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). This novel combination of techniques from machine learning, sparsity regularisation, seismic imaging and history matching aims to address the ill-posedness of the inversion of historical production data efficiently using ES-MDA. In the numerical experiments provided, I demonstrate that these sparse representations of the petrophysical properties and the seismic attributes enables to obtain better production data matches to the true production data and to quantify the propagating waterfront better compared to more traditional methods that do not use comparable parametrisation techniques.