Geostatistical rock physics AVA inversion

Abstract

Reservoir models are numerical representations of the subsurface petrophysical properties such as porosity, volume of minerals and fluid saturations. These are often derived from elastic models inferred from seismic inversion in a two-step approach: first, seismic reflection data are inverted for the elastic properties of interest (such as density, P-wave and S-wave velocities); these are then used as constraining properties to model the subsurface petrophysical variables. The sequential approach does not ensure a proper propagation of uncertainty throughout the entire geo-modelling workflow as it does not describe a direct link between the observed seismic data and the resulting petrophysical models. Rock physics models link the two domains. We propose to integrate seismic and rock physics modelling into an iterative geostatistical seismic inversion methodology. The proposed method allows the direct inference of the porosity, volume of shale and fluid saturations by simultaneously integrating well-logs, seismic reflection data and rock physics model predictions. Stochastic sequential simulation is used as the perturbation technique of the model parameter space, a calibrated facies-dependent rock physics model links the elastic and the petrophysical domains and a global optimizer based on cross-over genetic algorithms ensures the convergence of the methodology from iteration to iteration. The method is applied to a 3D volume extracted from a real reservoir dataset of a North Sea reservoir and compared to a geostatistical seismic AVA.