Characterization of a carbonate geothermal reservoir using rock-physics-guided deep neural networks

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have the potential to streamline the integration of seismic data for reservoir characterization by providing estimates of rock properties that are directly interpretable by geologists and reservoir engineers instead of elastic attributes like most standard seismic inversion methods. However, they have yet to be applied widely in the energy industry because training DNNs requires a large amount of labeled data that is rarely available. Training set augmentation, routinely used in other scientific fields such as image recognition, can address this issue and open the door to DNNs for geophysical applications. Although this approach has been explored in the past, creating realistic synthetic well and seismic data representative of the variable geology of a reservoir remains challenging. Recently introduced theory-guided techniques can help achieve this goal. A key step in these hybrid techniques is the use of theoretical rock-physics models to derive elastic pseudologs from variations of existing petrophysical logs. Rock-physics theories are already commonly relied on to generalize and extrapolate the relationship between rock and elastic properties. Therefore, they are a useful tool to generate a large catalog of alternative pseudologs representing realistic geologic variations away from the existing well locations. While not directly driven by rock physics, neural networks trained on such synthetic catalogs extract the intrinsic rock-physics relationships and are therefore capable of directly estimating rock properties from seismic amplitudes. Neural networks trained on purely synthetic data are applied to a set of 2D poststack seismic lines to characterize a geothermal reservoir located in the Dogger Formation northeast of Paris, France. The goal of the study is to determine the extent of porous and permeable layers encountered at existing geothermal wells and ultimately guide the location and design of future geothermal wells in the area. © 2021 by The Society of Exploration Geophysicists.