The Value of Seismic Data in Production History Matching

Several approaches to the incorporation of seismic survey data into the history matching are explored. A 3D synthetic reservoir with known geo-statistical characteristics is used to simulate seismic data as well as flow rate and well pressure data under a given production scenario. An ensemble method is used to generate likely model realizations from the known geo-statistics. The Ensemble Kalman Filter is subsequently used to update the model porosity, permeability, pressure and saturation based on both the production and seismic data. Results of experiments that aim at quantifying the potential benefit of including seismic data are presented. A simple 2D reservoir is used to demonstrate the value of saturation information away from the wells. Two approaches are investigated with a 3D reservoir: In the first, each seismic survey is inverted to provide (depth-averaged) estimates of pressure and saturation, which are subsequently used during the model update. In the second case, two-way seismic travel times to the top and bottom of the reservoir are used directly by comparison with synthetic travel times. Both approaches can easily be extended to time-lapse mode.