Challenges and Solutions of Geostatistical Inversion for Reservoir Characterization of the Supergiant Lula Field

Summary The creation of reservoir model properties has become an art of bringing together hard and soft data, gathering ideas of geologists and geophysicists, constraining them with measured values in- and outside wells. Through lifecycle of the oil field the information coverage is growing - new wells are being drilled, new seismic acquisitions are performed, and new geological concepts are developed. The Brazilian pre-salt fields are no exception. However, these fields experience additional challenges, where the carbonates show significant lateral and vertical variability and the salt layer limits illumination and penetration of the seismic signal. In this paper, we investigate performance of three techniques on the Lula field: simulation, which "propagates" properties between wells; deterministic inversion, which transforms seismic amplitudes into elastic properties; and geostatistical inversion, which combines simulation and seismic-driven inversion. We demonstrate that geostatistical inversion brings together the best of both techniques and helps address the challenges of characterization of pre-salt carbonates.