3D geological interpretation for geosteering of wells is a new knowledge building project for industry financed by the RCN Petromaks 2 program and the DigiWells’ industry partners.
The knowledge building project was evaluated very positively by international experts and awarded by RCN Petromaks in June.
In order to optimize well-placement decision support for drilling in complex formations, this work aims to establish and verify a workflow for automating, real-time, around-bit 3D geological interpretation of deep sensing electromagnetics(EM) logs. This workflow prepares the ground for future automatic updating of standard probabilistic 3D well-scale sector geomodels. The approach obviates the need for manual management of geomodels during the real-time phase.
Senior Researcher Nazanin Jahani, NORCE, will lead the project and collaboration partners will be University of Stavanger and UT Austin. NORCE and UiS have for many years benefitted from tight collaboration with prof. Reidar Bratvold, and in 2021 Jahani visited UT Austin for 5 months funded by a Fulbright scholarship. We are very happy to continue the fruitful collaboration with both UiS and UT Austin. The project will also benefit from a collaboration with Baker Hughes, that will contribute in-kind especially for the case studies. The active involvement of the supporting oil companies in DigiWells will ensure relevance of the project activities.
The geosteering activity in SFI DigiWells will be considerably strengthened by this project, and we are looking forward to starting the research.