Automatic Adaptive Parameterization for History Matching of 3D Seismic Data

Building reservoir models consistent with seismic data can be difficult and requires a lot of flexibility in the choice of the parameters to be perturbed. To achieve this goal, local parameterization techniques can be applied, such as pilot-point or gradual deformation methods. The regions to be perturbed are usually fixed before the optimization is launched and are kept unchanged. Recent attempts to define the regions adaptively have been proposed, focusing on the mismatch between simulated and reference seismic data. However, the regions are defined manually for each optimization process. Therefore, we propose to drive the define of the parameter support by performing an automatic definition of the regions to be perturbed: the residual map which measures the misfit between simulated attributes and actual ones is first computed; then it is clustered into separate regions using a quasi-automatic procedure and last, the regions to be perturbed by local parameterization techniques are defined from a connectivity criterion. At each of these steps, the reservoir engineer must input a few parameters only. A synthetic study based on the PUNQ test case is presented to validate the proposed methodology. The potential of the approach is illustrated by comparing it to non-adaptive procedures.