Joint petrophysical inversion of electromagnetic and full-waveform seismic data

Abstract

Accurate determination of reservoir petrophysical parameters is of great importance for reservoir monitoring and characterization. We developed a joint inversion approach for the direct estimation of in situ reservoir petrophysical parameters such as porosity and fluid saturations by jointly inverting electromagnetic and full-waveform seismic measurements. Full-waveform seismic inversions allow the exploitation of the full content of the data so that a more accurate geophysical model can be inferred. Electromagnetic data are linked to porosity and fluid saturations through Archie’s equations, whereas seismic data are linked to them through rock-physics fluid-substitution equations. For seismic modeling, we used an acoustic approximation. Sensitivity studies combined with inversion tests show that seismic data are mainly sensitive to porosity distribution, whereas electromagnetic data are more sensitive to fluid-saturation distribution. The separate inversion of electromagnetic or seismic data is highly nonunique and thus leads to great ambiguity in the determination of porosity and fluid saturations. In our approach, we used a Gauss-Newton algorithm equipped with the multiplicative regularization and proper data-weighting scheme. We tested the implemented joint petrophysical inversion method using various synthetic models for surface and crosswell measurements. We found that the joint inversion approach provides substantial advantage for an improved estimation of porosity and fluid-saturation distributions over the one obtained from the separate inversion of electromagnetic and seismic data. This advantage is achieved by significantly reducing the ambiguity on the determination of porosity and fluid saturations using multiphysics measurements. We also carried out a study on the effects of using inaccurate petrophysical transform parameters on the inversion results. Our study demonstrated that up to 20% errors in the saturation and porosity exponents in Archie’s equations do not cause significant errors in the inversion results. On the other hand, if the bulk modulus and density of the rock matrix have a large percentage of errors (i.e., more than 5%), the inversion results will be significantly degraded. However, if the density of the rock matrix has an error of less than 2%, the joint inversion can tolerate a large percentage of errors in the bulk modulus of the rock matrix.