A Novel 3D Viscoelastic Acoustic Wave Equation Based Update Method for Reservoir History Matching

The oil and gas industry has been revolutionized within the last decade, 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 previously unimaginable depths like the off-shore exploration in the South China sea and Gulf of Mexico. With the development of 4D seismic, engineers and scientists have been enabled to map the evolution of fluid fronts within the reservoir and determine the displacement caused by the injected fluids. This in turn has led to enhanced production strategies, cost reduction and increased profits. Conventional approaches to incorporate seismic data into the history matching process have been to invert these data for constraints that are subsequently employed in the history matching process. 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 generally ill-conditioned inversion problems. I have presented here a novel approach via including the time-lapse cross-well seismic survey data directly into the history matching process. The generated time-lapse seismic data are obtained from the full wave 3D viscoelastic acoustic wave equation. Furthermore an extensive analysis has been performed showing the robustness of the method and enhanced forecastability of the critical reservoir parameters, reducing uncertainties and exhibiting the benefits of a full wave 3D seismic approach. Finally, the improved performance has been statistically confirmed. The improvements illustrate the significant improvements in forecasting that are obtained via readily available seismic data without the need for inversion. This further optimizes oil production in addition to increasing return-on-investment on oil & gas field development projects, especially in offshore environments.