THE STAG OIL FIELD FORMATION EVALUATION: A NEURAL NETWORK APPROACH

Abstract

The producing M. australis Sandstone of the Stag Oil Field is a bioturbated glauconitic sandstone that is difficult to evaluate using conventional methods. Well log and core data are available for the Stag Field and for the nearby Centaur–1 well. Eight wells have log data; six also have core data.

In the past few years artificial intelligence has been applied to formation evaluation. In particular, artificial neural networks (ANN) used to match log and core data have been studied. The ANN approach has been used to analyse the producing Stag Field sands. In this paper, new ways of applying the ANN are reported. Results from simple ANN approach are unsatisfactory. An integrated ANN approach comprising the unsupervised Self-Organising Map (SOM) and the Supervised Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) appears to give a more reasonable analysis.

In this case study the mineralogical and petrophysical characteristics of a cored well are predicted from the 'training' data set of the other cored wells in the field. The prediction from the ANN model is then used for comparison with the known core data. In this manner, the accuracy of the prediction is determined and a prediction qualifier computed.

This new approach to formation evaluation should provide a match between log and core data that may be used to predict the characteristics of a similar uncored interval. Although the results for the Stag Field are satisfactory, further study applying the method to other fields is required.