Abstract

The oil and gas industry relies on accurately predicting profitable clusters in subsurface formations for geophysical reservoir analysis. It is challenging to predict payable clusters in complicated geological settings like the Lower Indus Basin, Pakistan. In complex, high-dimensional heterogeneous geological settings, traditional statistical methods seldom provide correct results. Therefore, this paper introduces a robust unsupervised AI strategy designed to identify and classify profitable zones using self-organizing maps (SOM) and K-means clustering techniques. Results of SOM and K-means clustering provided the reservoir potentials of six depositional facies types (MBSD, DCSD, MBSMD, SSiCL, SMDFM, MBSh) based on cluster distributions. The depositional facies MBSD and DCSD exhibited high similarity and achieved a maximum effective porosity (PHIE) value of ≥ 15%, indicating good reservoir rock typing (RRT) features. The density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) showed minimum outliers through meta cluster attributes and confirmed the reliability of the generated cluster results. Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) model identified PHIE as the most significant parameter and was beneficial in identifying payable and non-payable clustering zones. Additionally, this strategy highlights the importance of unsupervised AI in managing profitable cluster distribution across various geological formations, going beyond simple reservoir characterization.

Document Type

Journal Article

Date of Publication

12-1-2024

Volume

10

Issue

1

Funding Information

National Natural Science Foundation of China / Special Project for Social Development of Yunnan Province

School

School of Engineering

Grant Number

U2202207, 202103AC100001

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Publisher

Springer

Comments

Ashraf, U., Anees, A., Zhang, H., Ali, M., Thanh, H. V., & Yuan, Y. (2024). Identifying payable cluster distributions for improved reservoir characterization: A robust unsupervised ML strategy for rock typing of depositional facies in heterogeneous rocks. Geomechanics and Geophysics for Geo-Energy and Geo-Resources, 10(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40948-024-00848-9

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Link to publisher version (DOI)

10.1007/s40948-024-00848-9