View article

In this paper we address two fairly difficult problems. The first is the problem of matching production data (in this case, production and injection rates) by adjustment of the locations of the geologic facies boundaries. The second is the use of a Kalman filter for updating the facies locations in the reservoir model. Traditional automatic history matching tools are not widely available for reservoirs with unknown facies boundaries, largely because of the complexity of developing software for computing the sensitivity of the data to model parameters, the lack of differentiability of facies type, and the high computational cost in generating multiple reservoir models that are conditional to given data. With careful definition of variables, the use of the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) minimizes those difficulties. First, the gradient does not need to be computed explicitly, the coding for the EnKF algorithm is easy and adaptable to any …