Assessment of multilevel ensemble-based data assimilation for reservoir history matching

Multilevel ensemble-based data assimilation (DA) as an alternative to standard (single-level) ensemble-based DA for reservoir history matching problems is considered. Restricted computational resources currently limit the ensemble size to about 100 for field-scale cases, resulting in large sampling errors if no measures are taken to prevent it. With multilevel methods, the computational resources are spread over models with different accuracy and computational cost, enabling a substantially increased total ensemble size. Hence, reduced numerical accuracy is partially traded for increased statistical accuracy. A novel multilevel DA method, the multilevel hybrid ensemble Kalman filter (MLHEnKF) is proposed. Both the expected and the true efficiency of a previously published multilevel method, the multilevel ensemble Kalman filter (MLEnKF), and the MLHEnKF are assessed for a toy model and two reservoir models. A multilevel sequence of approximations is introduced for all models. This is achieved via spatial grid coarsening and simple upscaling for the reservoir models, and via a designed synthetic sequence for the toy model. For all models, the finest discretization level is assumed to correspond to the exact model. The results obtained show that, despite its good theoretical properties, MLEnKF does not perform well for the reservoir history matching problems considered. We also show that this is probably caused by the assumptions underlying its theoretical properties not being fulfilled for the multilevel reservoir models considered. The performance of MLHEnKF, which is designed to handle restricted computational resources well, is quite good. Furthermore, the toy model is utilized to set up a case where the assumptions underlying the theoretical properties of MLEnKF are fulfilled. On that case, MLEnKF performs very well and clearly better than MLHEnKF.