History Matching Reservoir Models With Many Objective Bayesian Optimization

Abstract

Reservoir models for predicting subsurface fluid and rock behaviors can now include upwards of billions (and potentially trillions) of grid cells and are pushing the limits of computational resources. History matching, where models are updated to match existing historical data more closely, is conducted to reduce the number of simulation runs and is one of the primary time‐consuming tasks. As models get larger the number of parameters to match increases, and the number of objective functions increases, and traditional methods start to reach their limitations. To solve this, we propose the use of Bayesian optimization (BO) in a hybrid cloud framework. BO iteratively searches for an optimal solution in the simulations campaign through the refinement of a set of priors initialized with a set of simulation results. The current simulation platform implements grid management and a suite of linear solvers to perform the simulation on large scale distributed‐memory systems. Our early results using the hybrid cloud implementation shown here are encouraging on tasks requiring over 100 objective functions, and we propose integrating BO as a built‐in module to efficiently iterate to find an optimal history match of production data in a single package platform. This paper reports on the development of the hybrid cloud BO based history matching framework and the initial results of the application to reservoir history matching.