Adjoint-based History-matching of Production and Time-lapse Seismic Data (SPE 154375)

Time-lapse (4D) seismic attributes can provide valuable information on the fluid flow within subsurface reservoirs. This spatially-rich source of information complements the poor areal information obtainable from production well data. While fusion of information from the two sources holds great promise, in practice, this task is far from trivial. Joint Inversion is complex for many reasons, including different time and spatial scales the fact that the coupling mechanisms between the various parameters are often not well established, the nature of the required model updates is localized, and the necessity to integrate multiple data. These concerns limit the applicability of many data-assimilation techniques. Adjoint-based methods are free of these drawbacks but their implementation generally requires extensive programming effort. In this study we present a workflow that exploits the adjoint functionality that modern simulators offer for production data to consistently assimilate inverted 4D seismic attributes without the need of re-programming of the adjoint code. Here we discuss a novel workflow which we applied to assimilate production data and 4D seismic data from a synthetic reservoir model, which acts as the real - yet unknown - reservoir. Synthetic production data and 4D seismic data were created from this model to study the performance of the adjoint-based method. The seamless structure of the workflow allowed rapid setup of the data assimilation process, while execution of the process was reduced significantly. The resulting reservoir model updates displayed a considerable improvement in matching the saturation distribution in the field, as well as a vast improvement in predictive capacity. This work was carried out as part of a joint Shell-IBM research project.