Petrophysical parameters, such as porosity and fluid (water, oil, and/or gas) saturation, which provide useful information for reservoir characterization, can be estimated by a rock physics model (RPM) using seismic velocity and resistivity data from ...
Petrophysical parameters, such as porosity and fluid (water, oil, and/or gas) saturation, which provide useful information for reservoir characterization, can be estimated by a rock physics model (RPM) using seismic velocity and resistivity data from geophysical surveys. Recently, several researchers have proposed simultaneous integrated inversion methods for the direct estimation of petrophysical parameters. However, the methods require large amounts of computer memory and computing time, and determination of the balancing factor among different types of geophysical dataset for successful inversion is difficult. In this study, an effective integrated inversion of seismic and electromagnetic (EM) data for the accurate estimation of petrophysical parameters is proposed. The proposed method consists of two stages. For the first stage, to improve the resolution of the resistivity images from EM inversion, a seismic-constrained EM inversion algorithm using a cross-gradient constraint between P-wave velocity and resistivity was developed. The P-wave velocity structure obtained by seismic full-waveform inversion (FWI) using plane-wave encoding is used as a structural constraint for the seismic-constrained EM inversion. The cross-gradient constraint can enhance not only the structural similarity between P-wave velocity and resistivity results, but also the accuracy of inverted resistivity values. In addition, iteratively reweighted least squares and a priori information enable improvement of the convergence of the inversion and the resolution of the inverted resistivity. In the second stage, an integrated estimation approach using the grid-search method is applied to an RPM to reliably estimate the petrophysical parameters from the seismic FWI and seismic-constrained EM inversion results. Archie’s equation and Gassmann’s equation can be used to establish a link between inversion results and petrophysical parameters, and target-oriented estimation can reduce computing time. The results of numerical experiments with a complex SEG advanced model containing a salt dome and oil reservoir and with a realistic CO2 sequestration monitoring model demonstrated that the proposed method can reliably estimate petrophysical parameters.