Abstract
4D seismic has been utilised on several fields for improved reservoir monitoring and management. There have been ongoing efforts to incorporate 4D seismic interpretation results as standard monitoring parameters and encouraging results have been achieved for the integration of this data for reservoir dynamic analysis. This paper presents new methodologies and applications for the use of 4D seismic monitoring inferences as history match indicators for different dynamic realisations.
Matching the historical performance of a reservoir is a time-consuming task with a non-unique solution and hence the inherent uncertainty questions the credibility of forecasted results. Experimental design workflows take into account the influence of multiple parameters and their inter-dependency to assess the impact of the uncertainties on business decisions. The history match quality of a range of realisations has generally been assessed in terms of water breakthrough times, pressures, production rates, FPWD (formation pressure while drilling) data and other monitoring measurements such as PLT (production logging tool) data. As 4D seismic acquisition is becoming a standard monitoring technology for many fields, efforts have been devoted to obtain increased benefit from this data for the history matching process and it is now being used to assess the history match quality of a range of dynamic realisations and improve the response surface modelling.
The monitoring parameters obtained from 4D seismic are case-specific. A turbidite water-flood field is considered here and the match of the simulated vs. observed flood-fronts from 4D seismic are used as a new parameter amongst others to assess the history match of multiple simulation runs. The flood-fronts are obtained as 3D geobodies from 4D seismic attribute interpretation. The interpretations are validated with geology and analytical integration with dynamic data. This validation process is considered essential for the effective application of this methodology.
These workflows show promising results of including 4D seismic based history match indicators and hence hold potential to facilitate the geological model update loop as well as 4D seismic assisted/automated history matching approaches.
