Identifying reservoir depletion patterns from production-induced deformations with applications to seismic imaging

Conclusion and Perspectives

We have developed a computationally efficient method for modeling deformation from pore pressure decline and for inverting pore-pressure change from observable deformations/subsidence. The method has been implemented for both slowly-varying and layered media and tested on synthetics based on real-world examples of production-induced subsidence. We propose an approach to using observable deformations for estimating velocity change based on empirical rock-property relations.

While all the main building blocks required for regularizing time-lapse inversion with subsidence-based constrains are in place, an integrated seismic/geomechanical data set is required to validate our approach. While the deformation modeling and pore pressure inversion components can be tested on synthetic data, testing the regularization approach requires real data. Time-lapse synthetics would be generated using the same kind of techniques for modeling production-induced velocity change as we intend to use for the regularization, hence purely synthetic tests cannot completely validate our approach.

Identifying reservoir depletion patterns from production-induced deformations with applications to seismic imaging