New direction for regional reservoir quality prediction using machine learning - Example from the Stø Formation, SW Barents Sea, Norway

Recently, the petroleum industry has focused on deeply buried reservoir discoveries and exploring potential CO₂ storage sites close to existing infrastructure to increase the life span of already operating installations to save time and cost. It is therefore essential for the petroleum industry to find an innovative approach that exploits the existing core- and well log data to be successful in their endeavor of effectively characterizing and predicting reservoir quality. Continuous data sources (e.g. wireline logs) have a huge potential compared with expensive, time inefficient and sporadic data from cores in determining reservoir quality for use in a regional context. However, whereas core analysis offers in-depth knowledge about rock properties and diagenetic processes, continuous data sources can be difficult to interpret without a formation-specific framework. Here, we demonstrated how the pre-existing core data could be effectively used by integrating petrographic- and facies data with a pure predictive machine learning (ML) based porosity predictor. The inclusion of detailed core analysis is important for determining which reservoir parameter(s) that should be modeled and for the interpretation of model outputs. By applying this methodology, a framework for deducing lithological and diagenetic attributes can be established to aid reservoir quality delineation from wireline logs that can be used in frontier areas. With the ML porosity model, a Random Forest Regressor, the square of the correlation was 0.84 between predicted- and helium porosity test data over a large dataset consisting of 38 wells within the Stø Formation across the SW Barents Sea. By integrating the continuous ML porosity logs and core data, it was possible to differentiate three distinct bed types on wireline log responses within the Stø Formation. Particularly, the relationship between Gamma ray (GR) and porosity was effective in separating high porosity clean sand-, low porosity cemented clean sand and more clay and silt rich intervals. Additionally, in the P-wave velocity (VP) - density domain, separation of high porosity clean sand- and heavily cemented low porosity clean sand intervals were possible. The results also show that the ML derived porosity curves coincide with previously published and independent facies data from a selection of the wells included in the study. This demonstrates the applicability of the model in the region, because the Stø Formation has been described to exhibit similar lithological- and mineralogical properties over large parts of the Western Barents Sea area. Even though, continuous porosity data could be estimated from other sources like VP, neutron or density logs, this would generally require matrix and fluid information. This study demonstrated the effectiveness of the ML model in generating continuous porosity logs that are useful for characterizing and predicting reservoir properties in new wells. This methodology offers a workflow for exploiting already acquired core and well log data for frontier exploration that can be adapted to other formations and exploration scenarios worldwide.