Geophysics Immersion on Reservoir Model Workflow

Breton, Pascal, Roselyne Botton-Dumay, Thierry Modiano, Emmanuelle Brechet, Total, Pau, France

In the past few years many papers about reservoir characterization have been proposed to promote the use of seismic data as a help for petrophysical and facies reservoir model­ing. Especially new generation of lithoseismic attributes have highlighted their interest to introduce 3D heterogeneities inside the reservoir model.

However this seismic contribution aspect, regularly promoted, should not hide that seis­mic integration must be considered at each steps of the entire reservoir modeling workflow in order to ensure a complete coherency between geophysics and geology. Moreover, to be more efficient, seismic integration along the workflow must be done together with the geol­ogist and inside the reservoir model tool as a common data support. This complete immer­sion of the geophysics inside the reservoir model world will ensure a faster optimization of dynamic reservoir model.

This paper proposes to illustrate a new road map for reservoir model construction, inte­grating a direct coupling of seismic contribution inside the reservoir modeling process.

Several multidisciplinary stops, considered as compulsory, are indicated on this road map to emphasize key levels of integration: - to ensure structural seismic deliverable fitted to reservoir model needs, - to provide fault characterization parameters of interest for dynamic comprehension, - to stick the reservoir model gridding within geophysical limits, ­to tightly couple high vertical well resolution and high lateral seismic resolution for better heterogeneity representation, - to provide a reservoir model ready for simulation and still coherent with original seismic data, which will be able to take into account future 4D seis­mic information.

New tools, combined with new methodological approaches, have been introduced in our reservoir model workflow to secure these multidisciplinary integration steps. Geophysics contribution is no longer considered as an upstream static input data but has become an active partner of the reservoir modeling process.