A methodology to constrain pressure and saturation estimation from 4D seismic using multiple simulation models and observed data

The use of time-lapse seismic data to improve reservoir characterization is becoming a common practice in the oil industry. Nevertheless, the integration of datasets with different characteristics, such as flow simulation and seismic data, is still a challenge. One of the possible ways to perform the integration is the use of extracted pressure and saturation from 4D seismic in the history matching process. However, the quantitative use of pressure and saturation difference maps in the objective function needs more accurate estimation of these dynamic properties. Thus, this work proposes a methodology to use multiple simulation model realizations, generated through the combination of uncertain reservoir attributes, to guide an inversion process that evaluates pressure and saturation from 40 seismic, in order to provide estimations that are more reliable. The application of the methodology in a synthetic dataset showed promising results. The main contribution of this work is to show that it is possible to use available knowledge from flow simulation and reservoir characterization to constrain time-lapse data and extract from it more reliable information. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.