Petrophysical properties prediction from prestack seismic data using convolutional neural networks

We have built convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to obtain petrophysical properties in the depth domain from prestack seismic data in the time domain. We compare two workflows end-to-end and cascaded CNNs. An end-to-end CNN, referred to as PetroNet, directly predicts petrophysical properties from prestack seismic data. Cascaded CNNs consist of two CNN architectures. The first network, referred to as ElasticNet, predicts elastic properties from prestack seismic data followed by a second network, referred to as ElasticPetroNet, that predicts petrophysical properties from elastic properties. Cascaded CNNs with more than twice the number of trainable parameters as compared to end-to-end CNN demonstrate similar prediction performance for a synthetic data set. The average correlation coefficient for test data between the true and predicted clay volume (approximately 0.7) is higher than the average correlation coefficient between the true and predicted porosity (approximately 0.6) for both networks. The cascaded workflow depends on the availability of elastic properties and is three times more computationally expensive than the end-to-end workflow for training. Coherence plots between the true and predicted values for both cases show that maximum coherence occurs for values of the inverse wave-number greater than 15 m, which is approximately equal to 1/4 the source wavelength or lambda/4. The network predictions have some coherence with the true values even at a resolution of 10 m, which is half of the variogram range used in simulating the spatial correlation of the petrophysical properties. The Monte Carlo dropout technique is used for approximate quantification of the uncertainty of the network predictions. An application of the end-to-end network for prediction of petrophysical properties is made with the Stybarrow field located in offshore Western Australia. The network makes good predictions of petrophysical properties at the well locations. The network is particularly successful in identifying the reservoir facies of interest with high porosity and low clay volume.