Assimilating Microseismic and Well-Test Data by Use of EnKF for Accurate Reservoir Characterization

作者：Han Mei^*; Li Gaoming; Chen Jingyi

来源：SPE Journal, 2015, 20(1): 186-201.

The pressure-transient well-test data can be used to determine the thickness-weighted average permeability in a multilayer reservoir. Injection-or production-profile logs (layer rates), if available, may be used to further quantify the layer properties. This paper explores the possibility of the use of microseismic data in place of injection-/production-profile logs for layered-reservoir characterization. The microseismic first-arrival times from the perforation-timing shots of the test well to monitor wells can only resolve the average velocity along its wavepath but are more sensitive to the layer (or region) with high wave velocity (low productivity). On the contrary, the pressure-transient data are more sensitive to the properties of the high-productivity (high-permeability) layers. Therefore, these two types of data are complementary in reservoir characterization. In this paper, we assimilate these two types of data by use of the state-of-the-art ensemble-Kalman-filter (EnKF) method. Layered-homogeneous-and layered-heterogeneous-reservoir examples verified the complementary nature of these two types of data. The porosities and permeabilities in the layered reservoir obtained after assimilating both types of data are comparable with assimilating pressure-transient and layer-rate data. EnKF is a stochastic process, and the final results may depend on the initial ensemble because of sampling errors, sample size, and nonlinearity of the problem. In this paper, we generated 10 different ensembles for each example for better uncertainty quantification. The paper shows that assimilating pressure-transient data only will yield biased estimates of layered-reservoir properties, whereas assimilating both pressure and microseismic data improves the reservoir-property estimation and reservoir-prediction capabilities.

• 出版日期2015-2