An Integrated Reservoir Characterization Study Matching Production Data and 4D Seismic

Abstract

Abstract Our purpose is to evaluate the benefit of using time-lapse seismic in addition to production history for reservoir characterization. A new inversion methodology, based on the gradual deformation method, has been developed to integrate simultaneously different sources of information like 4D seismic related data and production data. This methodology was successfully validated on a geologically realistic 3D synthetic reservoir model. An optimization procedure was developed to identify reservoir models consistent both with a first 8 year period of production data and 4D seismic related data. It is based upon two complementary numerical tools developed at the IFP: the FFT-MA generator and the gradual deformation method. The first one generates stochastic realizations for the reservoir model. The second one allows us for perturbing the realizations from a small number of parameters while preserving the spatial variability model. The optimization process was repeated starting from different initial reservoir models. The predictive quality of the constrained reservoir models was estimated comparing the simulated forecasts and the reference data for a second 8 year period of production data. The proposed inversion method proved its efficiency for constraining geostatistical reservoir models to different sources of data. It is shown that conditioning reservoir models to saturation changes in addition to production data allows for improving significantly the reliability in the production forecasts.