Estimating Oil Reservoir Permeability and Porosity from Two Interacting Wells

The Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) can be used as a method to estimate reservoir parameters, such as permeability and porosity. These parameters play an important role in characterizing reservoir performance. The EnKF is a sequential estimation method that uses the parameters at t - 1 (called prior) to estimate the parameters at t adjusted by observations at t (called posterior). In this paper, the EnKF was used to estimate the reservoir parameters for the case of a linear flow of two interacting production-injection oil wells. The Laplace transform was used to obtain an analytical solution of the diffusivity equation. A state space representation was generated using the analytical solution. A simulation study showed that the proposed method can be used successfully to estimate the reservoir parameters using well-pressure observations.