Application of Computational Intelligence in Generating Synthetic Reservoir Rock Mechanical Parameters for Building Geo-Models.

Oil field Operations such as wellbore stability Management and variety of other activities in the upstream petroleum industry require geo-mechanical models for their analysis. Sometimes, the required subsurface measurements used to estimate rock parameters for building such models are unavailable. On this premise, past studies have offered variety of methods and investigative techniques such as empirical correlations, statistical analysis and numerical models to generate these data from available information. However, the complexity of the relationships that exists between the natural occurring variables make the aforementioned techniques limited. This work involves the application of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to generating rock properties. A three-layer back-propagation neural network model was applied predicting pseudo-sonic data using conventional wireline log data as input. Four well data from a Niger-Delta field were used in this study, one for training, one for validating and the two others for generating and testing results. The network was trained with different sets of initial random weights and biases using various learning algorithms. Root mean square error (RMSE) and correlation coefficient (CC) were used as key performance indicators. This Neural-Network-Generated-Sonic-log was compared with those generated with existing correlations and statistical analysis. The results showed that the most influential input vectors with various configurations for predicting sonic log were Depth-Resistivity-Gamma ray-Density (with correlating coefficient between 0.7 and 0.9). The generated sonic was subsequently used to compute for other elastic properties needed to build mechanical earth model for evaluating the strength properties of drilled formations, hence optimise drilling performance. The models are useful in Minimizing well cost, as well as reducing Non Productive Time (NPT) caused by wellbore instability. This technique is particularly useful for mature fields, especially in situations where obtaining this well logs are usually not practicable.