A sparse Bayesian imaging technique for efficient recovery of reservoir channels with time-lapse seismic measurements

by F. Sana, F. Ravanelli, T. Al-Nafouri, I. Hoteit
Year: 2016

Bibliography

A sparse Bayesian imaging technique for efficient recovery of reservoir channels with time-lapse seismic measurements
F. Sana, F. Ravanelli, T. Al-Nafouri, and I. Hoteit
IEEE of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 9, 2242-2254, 2016

Abstract

​Subsurface reservoir flow channels are characterized by high-permeability values and serve as preferred pathways for fluid propagation. Accurate estimation of their geophysical structures is thus of great importance for the oil industry. The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is a widely used statistical technique for estimating subsurface reservoir model parameters. However, accurate reconstruction of the subsurface geological features with the EnKF is challenging because of the limited measurements available from the wells and the smoothing effects imposed by the ℓ2-norm nature of its update step. A new EnKF scheme based on sparse domain representation was introduced by Sana et al. (2015) to incorporate useful prior structural information in the estimation process for efficient recovery of subsurface channels. In this paper, we extend this work in two ways: 1) investigate the effects of incorporating time-lapse seismic data on the channel reconstruction; and 2) explore a Bayesian sparse reconstruction algorithm with the potential ability to reduce the computational requirements. Numerical results suggest that the performance of the new sparse Bayesian based EnKF scheme is enhanced with the availability of seismic measurements, leading to further improvement in the recovery of flow channels structures. The sparse Bayesian approach further provides a computationally efficient framework for enforcing a sparse solution, especially with the possibility of using high sparsity rates through the inclusion of seismic data.

DOI: 10.1109/JSTARS.2016.2563163

Keywords

Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) K-SVD Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) Reservoir History Matching Seismic Imaging Sparsity Subsurface Channels Recovery Support Agnostic Bayesian Matching Pursuit (SABMP)