This thesis introduces novel ideas in subsurface reservoir model calibration known as History Matching in the reservoir engineering community. The target of history matching is to mimic historical pressure and production data from the producing wells with the output from the reservoir simulator for the sole purpose of reducing uncertainty from such models and improving confidence in production forecast. Ensemble based methods such as the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) and Ensemble Smoother with Multiple Data Assimilation (ES-MDA) as been proposed for history matching in literature. EnKF/ES-MDA is a Monte Carlo ensemble nature filter where the representation of the covariance is located at the mean of the ensemble of the distribution instead of the uncertain true model. In EnKF/ES-MDA calculation of the gradients is not required, and the mean of the ensemble of the realisations provides the best estimates with the ensemble on its own estimating the probability density. However, because of the inherent assumptions of linearity and Gaussianity of petrophysical properties distribution, EnKF/ES-MDA does not provide an acceptable history-match and characterisation of uncertainty when tasked with calibrating reservoir models with channel like structures. One of the novel methods introduced in this thesis combines a successive parameter and shape reconstruction using level set functions (EnKF/ES-MDA-level set) where the spatial permeability fields' indicator functions are transformed into signed distances. These signed distances functions (better suited to the Gaussian requirement of EnKF/ES-MDA) are then updated during the EnKF/ES-MDA inversion. The method outperforms standard EnKF/ES-MDA in retaining geological realism of channels during and after history matching and also yielded lower Root-Mean-Square function (RMS) as compared to the standard EnKF/ES-MDA. To improve on the petrophysical reconstruction attained with the EnKF/ES-MDA-level set technique, a novel parametrisation incorporating an unsupervised machine learning method for the recovery of the permeability and porosity field is developed. The permeability and porosity fields are posed as a sparse field recovery problem and a novel SELE (Sparsity-Ensemble optimization-Level-set Ensemble optimisation) approach is proposed for the history matching. In SELE some realisations are learned using the K-means clustering Singular Value Decomposition (K-SVD) to generate an overcomplete codebook or dictionary. This dictionary is combined with Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) to ease the ill-posed nature of the production data inversion, converting our permeability/porosity field into a sparse domain. SELE enforces prior structural information on the model during the history matching and reduces the computational complexity of the Kalman gain matrix, leading to faster attainment of the minimum of the cost function value. From the results shown in the thesis; SELE outperforms conventional EnKF/ES-MDA in matching the historical production data, evident in the lower RMS value and a high geological realism/similarity to the true reservoir model.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:764782 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Etienam, Clement |
| Contributors | Villegas, Rossmary ; Babaei, Masoud |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/structural-and-shape-reconstruction-using-inverse-problems-and-machine-learning-techniques-with-application-to-hydrocarbon-reservoirs(e21f1030-64e7-4267-b708-b7f0165a5f53).html |
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