Date: February 5, 2014
Location: Blocker 612
Speaker: Klemens Katterbauer (KAUST)
Title: Synergizing Electromagnetic and Seismic Techniques for Enhanced Reservoir History Matching via Data Assimilation Techniques
Authors: Klemens Katterbauer, Ibrahim Hoteit, Shuyu Sun
Earth Science & Engineering Program, King Abdullah University of Science & Technology, Saudi Arabia
Abstract:
Technology has fundamentally changed the oil and gas industry within the last decades, with horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing enabling the extraction of huge amounts of shale gas in areas previously considered impossible and the recovering of hydrocarbons in harsh environments like the Arctic or in deep depths such as the off-shore exploration in the Gulf of Mexico.
Time-lapse seismic data have enabled engineers and scientists to map more precisely hydrocarbon and fluid reservoirs and track their evolution. With the challenges faced by seismic methods in accurately distinguishing between hydrocarbons and injected fluids, the industry has been looking for electromagnetic methods in order to exploit the sharp contrast in conductivity between the fluids. This leads to a better tracking of the formation fluids, resulting in better production rates and increased profits. Conventional approaches to incorporate seismic and electromagnetic data is to invert these for using them as constraints to reservoir parameters in the history matching process and reservoir simulations. This approach makes the incorporation computationally expensive and requires a lot of manual processing for obtaining the correct interpretation due to the potential artifacts that are generated by the in general ill-conditioned inversion problems.
We present an Ensemble based History Matching framework incorporating time lapse electromagnetic and seismic data (Data attributes and Data obtained from full waveform electromagnetic and seismic surveys, both crosswell as well as surface) into an Ensemble based data assimilation method (Ensemble Kalman Filter, etc.). We furthermore present an outline on the incorporation of time lapse gravimetric, InSAR and magnetotelluric data. An extensive analysis has been performed showing the robustness of the method and enhanced forecastability of the critical reservoir parameters, reducing uncertainties and synergizing the benefits of electromagnetic and seismic techniques. The improvements illustrate the significant improvements in forecasting that are obtained via readily available electromagnetic and seismic data without the need for inversion and hence optimizing oil production in addition to increasing return-on-investment on oil & gas field development projects.