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Jointly updating the mean size and spatial distribution of facies in reservoir history matching

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Abstract

There exist several methods for history matching of reservoir facies distribution. When using these methods, the facies mean size is usually supposed to be prior information known without uncertainty. However, in reality, it is often difficult to acquire an accurate estimation of the facies mean size due to limited measurement data. Thus, it is more reasonable to treat the facies mean size as an uncertain model parameter for updating. In this work, we propose a methodology to jointly update the mean size and spatial distribution of facies in reservoir history matching. In the parameterization step, we utilize a Gaussian random field and a level set algorithm to parameterize each facies. The range of the Gaussian field controls the facies mean size of the generated facies distribution realizations. To accomplish jointly updating the mean size and spatial distribution of facies, the Gaussian random field is further parameterized by the Karhunen–Loeve (KL) expansion. We choose the range of the Gaussian field and the independent Gaussian random variables in the KL expansion as model parameters. After model parameterization, we use the Levenberg–Marquardt ensemble randomized maximum likelihood filter (LM_EnRML) to perform history matching. Three synthetic cases are set up to test the performance of the proposed method. Numerical results show that for estimating the facies field, the mean size and spatial distribution of facies can be jointly updated to match the reference distribution using the proposed method.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially funded by the Public Project of the Ministry of Land and Resources of China (Grant No. 201211063), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51304008 and U1262204), the National Science and Technology Major Project of China (Grant Nos. 2011ZX05009-006 and 2011ZX05052), and the National Key Technology R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2012BAC24B02).

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ERE and LTCS, College of Engineering, Peking University, Bei**g, 100871, China

    Haibin Chang & Dongxiao Zhang

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  1. Haibin Chang
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  2. Dongxiao Zhang
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Correspondence to Haibin Chang.

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Chang, H., Zhang, D. Jointly updating the mean size and spatial distribution of facies in reservoir history matching. Comput Geosci 19, 727–746 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10596-015-9478-7

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