Quantitative Analysis Involving Scaling Procedures for Integration between History Matching and 4D Seismic

Abstract

Time-lapse seismic has been providing valuable information on identifying fluid movements, to locate bypassed oil and well placement optimization to reduce uncertainties in reservoir development and production management. Most of these are made through a qualitative approach, which limits seismic data integration in reservoir simulation studies due to different scales. In order to overcome this and to develop new data integration techniques, many studies involving these processes have the assumption that both frameworks are in the same scale. Nonetheless, the quantification of lost information in the scaling procedures needs to be evaluated and quantitative seismic data integration into the simulator should improve the mitigation of these problems improving the knowledge about the representativeness of the scaled data. In this context, it is presented a technique regarding scale issues relating time-lapse seismic data and simulation models aiming to quantify the information lost due to scaling problems and how these troubles affect the history matching. This paper describes a methodology involving seismic attributes and reservoir simulation. The lost information due to scaling procedures is evaluated through comparison between flux model properties and seismic attributes, at each respective framework. This technique allows reliability improvement of reservoir parameters from seismic attributes regarding the loss of information due to scaling procedures and history matching. It has been shown that it is possible to match the history production in order to improve the process considering the scaling issues between the seismic and simulation scale, increasing model quality and reliability on results through a quantitatively analysis involving scaling procedures between 4D seismic data and reservoir simulation integrated studies. The main contributions of this technique are the integration procedures regarding scaling issues between seismic data, reservoir simulation models and history matching procedure by time-lapse seismic attributes.

Seismic Assisted History Matching Using Binary Image Matching

“…That a model is matched to production data is not a sufficient condition for it to make improved predictions (Sahni and Horne, 2006), the model needs to integrate all available data as well as the geologists interpretation of the reservoir in order to provide the most representative reservoir model or models (Landa, 1997, Landa and Horne, 1997, Wang and Kovscek, 2002. The need to monitor fluid displacement is a great challenge that has been successfully overcome with the use of 4D seismic technology (Hatchell et al, 2002, Lygren et al, 2002, Waggoner et al, 2002, Vasco et al, 2004, Portella and Emerick, 2005, Huang and Lin, 2006, Emerick et al, 2007, Kazemi et al, 2011, which is the process of repeating 3D seismic surveys over a producing reservoir in time-lapse mode (Kretz et al, 2004, Avansi andSchiozer, 2011). Quantitative use of 4D seismic data in history matching is an active research topic that has been explored extensively (Arenas et al, 2001, Clifford et al, 2003, MacBeth et al, 2004, Staples et al, 2005, Stephen and MacBeth, 2006, Kazemi et al, 2011, Jin et al, 2012, the main challenge being quantitatively incorporating the 4D seismic into the reservoir model (Landa, 1997, Walker et al, 2006, Jin et al, 2011.…”