Advanced machine learning for missing petrophysical property imputation applied to improve the characterization of carbonate reservoirs

Abstract

Missing data is a common cause of uncertainty in reservoir characterization, especially in core analysis of porosity and permeability. This is due to the high cost and time required to gather core samples while drilling through the entire reservoir thickness. Therefore, the ability to collect core samples and directly assess petrophysical parameters is restricted by the small proportion of the reservoir thickness that can be measured by the retrieved cores. As a result, the absence of data has the potential to lead to inconsistent and imprecise classification of reservoirs and geomodeling, thereby increasing reservoir uncertainty. Therefore, imputation algorithms are needed to estimate petrophysical properties for incomplete intervals. This study comprehensively compares seven imputation techniques for predicting missing horizontal and vertical core permeability and core porosity data in a well drilled through a carbonate reservoir in a southern Iraqi gas field. The performance of each method was assessed using relative bias (RB) and reasonable descriptive statistical distributions (histogram, log view, and box plots of data ratios to compare the imputed and original data), and robustness to outliers (RtO). The results revealed that the random imputation of missing data (RIMD) technique is the most effective algorithm in addressing the 30.5% missing data (vertical permeability), resulting in the attainment of the RB value closest to zero (0.04076191) compared to other algorithms. Principal component analysis (PCA) and random forest (RF) yielded the most favorable results in terms of handling missing values and outliers for the 15% missing ratio dataset (core porosity and horizontal permeability). The advantages of these approaches are related to their capacity to independently and accurately impute the missing data without requiring extra information, such as well logging records. Additionally, the multiple imputation and machine learning algorithms fill missing values with adequate numbers based on dataset variable distributions and correlations. Multiple plausible values quantify the uncertainty in estimating missing data, avoiding false precision (as with single imputation). Also, the novel workflow involving multiple imputation methods accurately take into account the correlations and variances between the variables. The novel workflow developed for missing data imputation has the potential to be applied to other clastic and carbonate reservoirs in oil and gas fields. The entire data imputation workflow was conducted, validated, visualized by codes in R, a robust open-source statistical computing software.