Geomechanical modeling for InSAR-derived surface deformation at steam-injection oil sand fields

Abstract

To estimate the distribution of reservoir deformation and reservoir volume change in an oil sand reservoir undergoing steam injection, we applied geomechanical inversion to surface uplift data derived from a differential interferometric synthetic-aperture radar (InSAR) stacking technique. We tested a two-step inversion method based on a tensional rectangular dislocation model. The first step of the inversion used genetic algorithms to estimate the depth of the reservoir and roughly model its deformation. The estimated depth of the reservoir was consistent with the depth of the injection point. The second step used a least-squares inversion with a penalty function and smoothing factor to efficiently invert the distribution of reservoir deformation and volume change from the surface uplift data. The distribution of reservoir deformation can be accurately estimated from InSAR-derived ground surface deformations using our proposed inversion techniques.