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Investigation of the sampling performance of ensemble-based methods with a simple reservoir model

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Abstract

The application of the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) for history matching petroleum reservoir models has been the subject of intense investigation during the past 10 years. Unfortunately, EnKF often fails to provide reasonable data matches for highly nonlinear problems. This fact motivated the development of several iterative ensemble-based methods in the last few years. However, there exists no study comparing the performance of these methods in the literature, especially in terms of their ability to quantify uncertainty correctly. In this paper, we compare the performance of nine ensemble-based methods in terms of the quality of the data matches, quantification of uncertainty, and computational cost. For this purpose, we use a small but highly nonlinear reservoir model so that we can generate the reference posterior distribution of reservoir properties using a very long chain generated by a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithm. We also consider one adjoint-based implementation of the randomized maximum likelihood method in the comparisons.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Petrobras. Av. Horacio de Macedo 950, Cid. Universitaria, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 21941-915, Brazil

    Alexandre A. Emerick

  2. Univ. of Tulsa, 800 South Tucker Drive, Tulsa, OK, 74104, USA

    Albert C. Reynolds

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  1. Alexandre A. Emerick
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Emerick, A.A., Reynolds, A.C. Investigation of the sampling performance of ensemble-based methods with a simple reservoir model. Comput Geosci 17, 325–350 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10596-012-9333-z

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