Estimation of porosity and volume of shale using artificial intelligence, case study of Kashafrud Gas Reservoir, NE Iran

Abstract

The key problem in oil exploration and engineering is the lack of accurate and reliable data about the reservoir parameters of a field. Having a precise assessment of petrophysical properties can provide the ability to make decisions with a high degree of confidence about planning for production, exploitation, and further field development scenario. In this research, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based approach was developed to improve the estimation of reservoir parameters including porosity and volume of shale, which has a significant role in different stages of hydrocarbon exploration, in the Kashafrud Gas Reservoir in the northeast of Iran. For this purpose, we measured the petrophysical properties of 27 samples of the Kashafrud Formation. To increase the amount of data for employing a multilayer perceptron (MLP) artificial neural network (ANN), a geostatistical algorithm was used to increase the amount of laboratory measured data of porosity and volume of shale to 686 and 702, respectively. In addition, 2263 well-logging data from the same well were provided. The optimal MLP network with the topology of 6-7-1, and 6-8-1 was selected to estimate the porosity and shale volume with mean squared error (MSE) of 2.78731E−4, and 1.28701E−9, respectively. The training process was performed using two different sets of input data. In the first approach, all available well-logging data were used as input, ending up in high MSE. In the second approach, some selected well logs were used based on the results of sensitivity analysis which clearly improved the estimations. The ability of MLP networks made great improvements in the estimation of the both parameters up to 99.9%. The presence of valuable core data in this study significantly improved the process of comparison and conclusion. The final results prove that AI is a trusted method, also the potential of the ANN method for the reservoir characterization and evaluation associated problems should be taken into consideration. Due to the unavailability of core data along the whole wells, the application of intelligent methods, such as machine learning (ML) can be used to estimate the parameters in other oil or gas fields and wells.