Reservoir geomechanical parameters identification based on ground surface movements

Determination of geomechanical parameters of petroleum reservoir and surrounding rock is important for coupled reservoir–geomechanical modeling, borehole stability analysis and hydraulic fracturing design. A displacement back analysis technique based on artificial neural network (ANN) and genetic algorithm (GA) combination is investigated in this paper to identify reservoir geomechanical parameters based on ground surface displacements. An ANN is used to map the nonlinear relationship between Young’s modulus, E, Poisson’s ratio, v, internal friction angle, Φ, cohesion, c and ground surface displacements. The necessary training and testing samples for ANN are created by using numerical analysis. GA is used to search the set of unknown reservoir geomechanical parameters. Results of the numerical experiment show that the displacement back analysis technique based on ANN–GA combination can effectively identify reservoir geomechanical parameters based on ground surface movements as a result of oil and gas production.