A New Robust Weak Supervision Deep Learning Approach for Reservoir Properties Prediction in Malaysian Basin Field

Featured Application: This article demonstrates the implementation of a new approach to weak supervision techniques for better reservoir properties prediction in the Malaysian Basin in order to improve seismic inversion in this region. The conventional seismic inversion approach is practical for operational work, as it only uses simple linearized algorithms and assumptions, but may be less applicable when dealing with a complex geological setting, especially in the Malay basin fields, as it may introduce non-linear noises and non-unique solutions. In the Malay basin, we also frequently struggle with a scarcity of reliable well data when performing seismic inversions. This makes finding an accurate prior model for inversion challenging and contributes to high uncertainty in properties� estimation. Implementation of deep learning for seismic inversion has become routine and has shown increasing capability in addressing nonlinearity in inverse problems. In this work, we develop a robust approach to deep learning-based seismic inversion to predict elastic properties from seismic data. The approach incorporates synthetic well and seismic data generation from a set of rock physics knowledge called the rock physics library, which plays a significant role in dataset input for network training, validation, and testing to improve elastic properties in this field. The deep learning network architecture comprising UNET and RESNET-18 with weak supervision networks has proven to be useful to enhance computational work efficiency and prediction accuracy while handling the non-linearity of the data and the non-uniqueness of the solutions. We successfully validated the proposed method on actual field data from a clastic fluvial-dominated field in the Malay basin. Upon comparative analysis with the conventional method, both inversion results are comparable and capable of identifying the reservoir occurrence and distribution. The conventional method exposed the presence of scattered amplitude noises and prominent seismic imprints masking the reservoir. Meanwhile, the proposed method showed more stable, clearer definition and fewer noise inversion results but with a faster turn-around time and a more efficient workflow. There are substantial improvements of up to 31 in correlation accuracy achieved upon implementing the proposed method for elastic properties prediction compared to the conventional. The result implies that the proposed method can provide a good elastic properties prediction framework while addressing data limitations and sparsity issues in typical deep learning-based inversions. © 2023 by the authors.