Artificial intelligence applications in reservoir engineering: A status check

Abstract

This article provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-art in the area of artificial intelligence applications to solve reservoir engineering problems. Research works including proxy model development, artificial-intelligence-assisted history-matching, project design, and optimization, etc. are presented to demonstrate the robustness of the intelligence systems. The successes of the developments prove the advantages of the AI approaches in terms of high computational efficacy and strong learning capabilities. Thus, the implementation of intelligence models enables reservoir engineers to accomplish many challenging and time-intensive works more effectively. However, it is not yet astute to completely replace the conventional reservoir engineering models with intelligent systems, since the defects of the technology cannot be ignored. The trend of research and industrial practices of reservoir engineering area would be establishing a hand-shaking protocol between the conventional modeling and the intelligent systems. Taking advantages of both methods, more robust solutions could be obtained with significantly less computational overheads.