loading page

Preemptive Detection of High Water-Cut Wells in Delaware Basin using a Joint Unsupervised and Supervised Learning Approach
  • +1
  • Jonathan Foster,
  • Siddharth Misra,
  • YUSUF FALOLA,
  • Mukul Bhatia
Jonathan Foster
Texas A&M University, Texas A&M University
Author Profile
Siddharth Misra
Texas A&M University, Texas A&M University
Author Profile
YUSUF FALOLA
Texas A&M University, Texas A&M University

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

Author Profile
Mukul Bhatia
Texas A&M University, Texas A&M University
Author Profile

Abstract

High water cut has been an issue in the Delaware basin for many years now. Volume of produced water continue to increase, resulting in adverse environmental impacts and higher reservoir-management costs. To address these problems, a data-driven workflow has been developed to pre-emptively identify the high water-cut wells. The workflow uses unsupervised pseudo-rock typing followed by supervised classification trained on well logs from 17 wells in the Delaware basin. The workflow requires a suite of 5 well logs from a 500-ft depth interval surrounding the kick-off points of these wells, which includes 200 ft above and 300 ft below the KOP. First, the well logs are clustered into 5 pseudo-rock types using multi-level clustering. Using statistical features extracted from these 5 pseudo-rock types, 3 supervised classifiers, namely K-nearest neighbor, support vector machine, and logistic regression, are trained and tested to detect the high water-cut wells. Over 100 cross validations, the 3 classifiers perform at a median Matthew’s Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.90. The kurtosis of the neutron porosity log response of the pseudo-rock type A0, interpreted as a shale lithology, is the most The submitted paper is currently under review. Dr. Sid Misra is the lead investigator on this topic. informative/relevant signature associated with high water cut. Next, the presence of pseudo-rock type A1, interpreted as high-permeability lithology, is an informative signature of low water-cut wells. The kurtosis of the density porosity log response of the pseudo-rock type B0, interpreted as carbonate lithology, and the presence of pseudo-rock type B1, interpreted as a tight sandstone lithology, serve as informative signatures for differentiating high water cut wells from low water cut wells.