Seismic Inversion Driven Improved Reservoir Characterisation and Production Optimisation in a Mature Field
Authors: Rajput Sanjeev , Yin Khor Yin , Pathak Ravi Kant , Kandau Flavia , Agrawal Prabhat , Ring Michael , Garun Ludovic Le , Bertoldi Luca , Amat Hadi B. , Ismail Saiful Adli B. 
Published: March 2016

In the current age of declining oil prices, mature fields matter today more than ever. About 70% of the current world oil production is from mature fields. To unlock the remaining potential from these fields, new wells need to be implemented by utilising technological advancements in reservoir characterisation, well engineering and reservoir engineering. This paper focuses on improving reservoir understanding by using rock physics and seismic inversion technology on a mature field, which is located in offshore Sarawak Malaysia.

Seismic data can be incorporated into an integrated workflow of predicting rock properties by utilising inversion processes that transform seismic data into a quantitative rock property, a descriptive measure of the reservoir. In this paper, an integrated workflow is adopted and it involves the application of rock physics driven seismic inversion for acoustic impedance (AI) prediction and geobody extraction. The extracted geobodies describe the areal extent of oil reservoir and changes in the rock property.

The field being studied consists of multi-stacked channelised reservoirs containing substantial amount of crevasse splay sands. The main producing units are thin oil sands with initial gas caps. These reservoirs typically display a high degree of vertical and lateral heterogeneity. Seismic inversion and geobody prediction were used as a method for the prediction of petrophysical properties including porosity, Net-to-Gross (NTG), water saturation and permeability at geo-cellular scale. To this end, the information from different fault blocks was integrated for the simulation study and incorporated into the evaluation of the oil potential in this mature field. A holistic approach that comprises both a material balance study and a simulation study was adopted.

The material balance study was used to verify the drive mechanism and to evaluate the transmissivity between different fault blocks. Prolific reservoirs were identified on inverted AI data and integrated into the static model for volumetric estimations and further high grading of the development drilling locations. As seismic inversion offers non-unique solutions, the integration of well log data allowed a technically acceptable answer as well as an estimation of the associated uncertainty. It can be concluded that rock physics driven seismic inversion results reduces uncertainty in property estimation during reservoir modelling while simultaneously improving field development plans.

This paper focuses on how the integration of seismic and well data was used to optimally characterise an oil reservoir in a mature field development and create a fit-for- purpose reservoir model. The goal was to optimise reservoir characterisation and production management which leads to success and low risk re-development. Ultimately, the economics were improved through reducing the uncertainties in monetising the remaining by-passed oil reserves to a manageable range.