Digital Twins of Hydrocarbon Reservoir

Abstract

The construction of a detailed geological model of the object under study is necessary to ensure the successful conduct of seismic exploration and the subsequent development of a hydrocarbon reservoir. This stage is crucial concerning fields in a carbonate environment, widespread in the north of Eastern Siberia, particularly for the Yurubcheno-Tokhomskaya zone. Indeed, such hydrocarbon reservoirs are characterized by an extremely complex internal structure represented by the presence of multiple accumulations of subseismic objects, such as caverns, fractures and fracture corridors. A definition is given in this work, and technology for constructing a digital twin of a geological object is provided. The digital twin of a geological object in our understanding is a set of data that determine its geometric and physical properties in conjunction with the corresponding synthetic geophysical fields. In this work, a seismic digital twin of one of the Yurubcheno-Tokhomskaya zone objects is constructed.

This work describes the technology for constructing a digital twin of one of the most complex geological objects - a cavernous-fractured hydrocarbons reservoir, complicated by geological faults. At this stage, we are interested in this object’s elastic characteristics, which affect its interaction with seismic waves. Three-dimensional seismic data and borehole observations are used as input information. We pay special attention to faults’ construction, given their thin internal structure filled with fractured breccias. To do this, we use discrete element modelling of fault formation, which allows us to take into account the fragmentation of the geological rock. The constructed multi-scale model destination performs full-scale numerical simulation; the main goal is to obtain an accurate description of the scattered waves. We use the previously developed finite-difference methods using grids with local refinement in time and space to describe their occurrence and propagation processes. As a result, we got a digital twin of a specific geological object. By this term, we mean a detailed full-scale elastic model together with the calculated seismic wave field.