TY - JOUR AU - Ritter,, Oliver AB - Summary Over the last decades, electromagnetic methods have become an accepted tool for a wide range of geophysical exploration purposes and nowadays even for monitoring. Application to hydrocarbon monitoring, for example for enhanced oil recovery, is hampered by steel-cased wells, which typically exist in large numbers in producing oil fields and which distort electromagnetic fields in the subsurface. Steel casings have complex geometries as they are very thin but vertically extended; moreover, the conductivity contrast of steel to natural materials is in the range of six orders of magnitude. It is therefore computationally prohibitively costly to include such structures directly into the modelling grid, even for finite element methods. To tackle the problem we developed a method to describe steel-cased wells as series of substitute dipole sources, which effectively interact with the primary field. The new approach cannot only handle a single steel-cased well, but also an arbitrary number, and their interaction with each other. We illustrate the metal casing effect with synthetic 3-D modelling of land-based controlled source electromagnetic data. Steel casings distort electromagnetic fields even for large borehole-transmitter distances above 2 km. The effect depends not only on the distance between casing and transmitter, but also on the orientation of the transmitter to the borehole. Finally, we demonstrate how the presence of steel-cased wells can be exploited to increase the sensitivity and enhance resolution in the target region. Our results show that it is at least advisable to consider the distribution of steel-cased wells already at the planning phase of a controlled source electromagnetic field campaign. Numerical solutions, Numerical approximations and analysis, Electromagnetic theory, Non-linear electromagnetics 1 INTRODUCTION Controlled Source electromagnetic (CSEM) prospecting has become an established tool for a wide range of exploration targets, including marine (Constable 2010), airborne (Siemon et al. 2009) and cross well applications (Newman & Alumbaugh 1997). Despite all improvements during the last decade, the presence of steel-cased wells in the study area remains a challenging task for EM modelling methodologies. One reason is the huge conductivity contrast of steel (in the order of |$5\times 10^{6}\thinspace {}{\rm S\, m}^{-1}$|⁠) to the surrounding rock formations (typically 0.01–1 S m−1) (Frischknecht 1988), which can cause accuracy problems for conventional finite differences and finite element simulation techniques. The second issue is related to the unfavourable spatial dimensions of steel casings. In the horizontal direction boreholes are only a few centimetres to decimetres wide but they can extend for several kilometres vertically. Direct integration of such structures into the modelling grid results in huge meshes and is computationally extremely costly, not only for finite difference simulation but also for finite element modelling. Most previous work dealing with the influence of steel casings was therefore based on integral equation approaches. Wait & Hill (1973) considered a long vertical extended cylinder in a homogeneous half-space. Augustin et al. (1989) investigated how EM measurements could be carried out behind a metal casing. More recent work by Commer et al. (2015) investigated the effect of a single steel-cased well on time domain electromagnetic methods by approximating the real borehole dimensions and conductivity of steel into the modelling grid. The study showed that, a steel-cased well in the vicinity of an EM source causes changes in amplitudes of the electric fields as well as reversing directions of the related electric currents in the subsurface. Commer et al. (2015) could also demonstrate, however, that the distortion of the EM fields by the steel casing leads to a significantly higher current concentration and thus higher resolution at reservoir level when compared to the case with absent casing. This general idea of making use of existing steel casings in exploration and monitoring goes back to the 1980s. Rocroi & Koulikov (1985) investigated if steel casings could be energized and used as vertical line sources to overcome a shielding effect of a resistive overburden for direct current measurements. Integration of such sources into modern 3-D frequency domain modelling and inversion schemes requires an accurate description of their physical behaviour. Yang et al. (2009) developed a method to calculate the distribution of source currents along an energized steel casing with depth for a 1-D half-space and Pardo et al. (2008) investigated the sensitivity of energized steel casings to water displacement in oil bearing formations. Feasibility studies on applicability of EM methods for hydrocarbon monitoring, that is, to image contrasts between formation water and oil over time (e.g. Orange et al. 2009; Wirianto et al. 2010), have indicated, that changes at reservoir level create rather small time-lapse signals which are challenging to resolve when using only surface transmitter and receivers. In oil fields, the reservoir is typically penetrated by many boreholes, energized steel casings can be seen as a simple and cheap way to move the EM source closer to the reservoir (e.g. Tietze et al. 2015) thereby enhancing sensitivity with depth. There are two principle ways to energize steel casings: actively, by galvanic connection, or passively, coupled by electromagnetic induction. Based on an idea presented by Swidinsky et al. (2013), Tang et al. (2015) developed a method to describe a single steel-cased well as a series of substitute dipole sources. The current strength of these dipoles (source segments) is calculated assuming a homogeneous background conductivity. Most importantly, these substitute dipole sources create additional secondary electromagnetic fields which can be regarded as an update of the primary field, which is obviously very useful when working with a secondary field formulation to solve Maxwell's equations. Since the response of the steel casing becomes part of the primary field calculation there is no need for an approximation and complicated discretization of the borehole casing in FD or FE meshes. As the approach of Tang et al. (2015) does not make any assumptions on the actual type and location of the transmitter, it can be used for galvanically connected as well as inductively coupled wells. Oil fields typically consist of dozens or hundreds of steel-cased wells, drilled within distances of a few hundred metres. It is therefore necessary to consider mutual induction between wells. For this paper, we expanded the algorithm of Tang et al. (2015) to take interaction between multiple wells into account. We implemented the new algorithm into our 3-D CSEM forward modelling (based on Streich 2009) and inversion (Grayver et al.2013) algorithm and show how steel casings influence the distribution of electric fields in a synthetic 3-D modelling scenario. Furthermore we show how the sensitivity of the inversion is influenced if steel-cased wells are present. 2 METHODOLOGY The methodology to include the effect of steel-cased wells into our 3-D finite difference controlled source electromagnetic modelling and inversion algorithm is based on an approach described by Tang et al. (2015). In this approach steel-cased wells are described as and substituted by a series of vertical electric dipole (VED) sources. The source current of these dipole sources is calculated from the z-component of the primary electric field at the position of the well segment produced by an arbitrary transmitter. In a second step, the additional electromagnetic field generated by these substitute dipoles is superimposed on the primary field of the transmitter. The updated primary field including the substitute dipoles can then be used for any secondary field approach in 3-D modelling or inversion. 2.1 A single steel-cased well First, we summarize the main ideas of the method presented by Tang et al. (2015) which is valid for a single and perfectly vertical steel-cased well. The borehole is subdivided into N segments and it is assumed that the vertical current density Jz, j on each segment j is constant. A sketch of one steel casing segment is shown in Fig. 1. The outer radius of the segment is given by ra, the inner radius by ri. Each segment has a length of dz and its centre point is located at depth zc. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Sketch of one borehole segment with length dz and outer and inner radii of ra and ri. The centre point of the casing is located at depth zc. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Sketch of one borehole segment with length dz and outer and inner radii of ra and ri. The centre point of the casing is located at depth zc. The vertical electric field at the centre point zc of each segment j is given by the superposition of the field generated by the transmitter and the field generated by each segment of the casing: \begin{equation} E_{z,j}(z_{c,j})=E_{z,j}^{{\rm prime}}(z_{c,j})+\sum _{k=1}^{N}E_{z,k}^{{\rm Wells}}(z_{c,j}), \end{equation} (1) with |$E_{z,j}^{{\rm prime}}$| being the z-component of the primary electric field generated by the transmitter. Eq. (1) can be rewritten as \begin{equation} \frac{J_{z,j}}{\sigma _{c}}=E_{z,j}^{{\rm prime}}+\sum _{k=1}^{N}J_{z,k}\int\!\!\!\int\!\!\!\int_{\Delta V_{k}}G_{zz}(x,y,z|x^{\prime },y^{\prime },z^{\prime }){\rm d}V^{\prime }, \end{equation} (2) where Jz, j is the vertical current density on the casing segment j, σc the conductivity of the casing (usually the conductivity of steel) and Gzz(x, y, z, |x΄, y΄, z΄) the Green's tensor element describing the vertical electric field generated at position (x, y, z) by a VED source located at (x΄, y΄, z΄). For a homogeneous half-space an analytic formulation of Gzz was given by Raiche & Coggon (1975): \begin{eqnarray} G_{zz}(x,y,z|x^{\prime },y^{\prime },z^{\prime })\!=\!\frac{1}{4\pi \sigma _{b}}\int _{0}^{\infty }\!\!\frac{k^{3}}{s}J_{0}(kr)(e^{-s|z-z^{\prime }|}-e^{-s|z+z^{\prime }|}){\rm d}k\nonumber\\ \end{eqnarray} (3) with s being \begin{equation} s=\sqrt{k^{2}-i\omega \mu \sigma _{b}}. \end{equation} (4) σb is the conductivity of the half-space, μ the magnetic permeability which is assumed to be the permeability of vacuum, ω the angular frequency and i the imaginary unit. J0 refers to the Bessel function of the first kind and order zero and r is the horizontal distance between source and receiver \begin{equation} r=\sqrt{(x-x^{\prime })^{2}+(y-y^{\prime })^{2}}. \end{equation} (5) A time dependency of e−iωt is assumed implicitly. After some rearrangements, eq. (2) can be expressed as system of linear equations of the form: \begin{equation} \mathbf {A}\mathbf {J_{z}}=\mathbf {E_{z}^{prime}}. \end{equation} (6) The diagonal elements of A are given by \begin{eqnarray} A_{ii}&=&\frac{1}{\sigma _{c}}-\frac{r_{a}}{2\sigma _{b}}\int _{0}^{\infty }\frac{k^{2}}{s^{2}}\left(2e^{-s\frac{dz}{2}}-2-e^{-s(2z_{c}+\frac{dz}{2})}\right)J_{1}(kr_{a}){\rm d}k\nonumber\\ && +\,\,\frac{r_{i}}{2\sigma _{b}}\int _{0}^{\infty }\frac{k^{2}}{s^{2}}\left(2e^{-s\frac{dz}{2}}-2-e^{-s(2z_{c}+\frac{dz}{2})}\right)J_{1}(kr_{i}){\rm d}k, \end{eqnarray} (7) and the non-diagonal elements result in \begin{eqnarray} A_{ij}&=&-\frac{r_{a}}{2\sigma _{b}}\int _{0}^{\infty }\frac{k^{2}}{s^{2}}\left(e^{-s(|z_{i}-z_{j}|+\frac{dz}{2})}-e^{-s(|z_{i}-z_{j}|-\frac{dz}{2})}\right.\nonumber\\ &&\left.-\,\,e^{-s(z_{i}+z_{j}+\frac{dz}{2})}+e^{-s(z_{i}+z_{j}-\frac{dz}{2})}\right)J_{1}(kr_{a}){\rm d}k\nonumber\\ &&+\,\,\frac{r_{i}}{2\sigma _{b}}\int _{0}^{\infty }\frac{k^{2}}{s^{2}}\left(e^{-s(|z_{i}-z_{j}|+\frac{dz}{2})}-e^{-s(|z_{i}-z_{j}|-\frac{dz}{2})}\right.\nonumber\\ &&\left.-\,\,e^{-s(z_{i}+z_{j}+\frac{dz}{2})}+e^{-s(z_{i}+z_{j}-\frac{dz}{2})}\right)J_{1}(kr_{i}){\rm d}k. \end{eqnarray} (8) Solving the system of equations given in eq. (6), we obtain the current density Jz for each well segment. The source current strength of each substitute dipole can be derived using \begin{equation} I_{z}=\pi \left(r_{a}^{2}-r_{i}^{2}\right)J_{z}. \end{equation} (9) Finally, the additional dipole sources are used to calculate an update of the primary field prior to the 3-D secondary field forward simulation. 2.2 Multiple coupled wells In presence of more than one well, the effect of the steel casings is interrelated and the current distribution on each well depends not only on the transmitter and the conductivity but also on the geometries of the other wells. In active oil fields the number can easily exceed 100 in an area of only a few square kilometres. Hence, we extended the approach described above to consider the interaction of multiple wells. The response of multiple wells and their interaction with each other can be incorporated if matrix A is expanded to M × M blocks, where M stands for the number of wells: \begin{equation} \mathbf {A}=\left(\begin{array}{cccc}\mathbf {A}_{11} &\quad \mathbf {A}_{21} &\quad \dots &\quad \mathbf {A}_{M1}\\ \mathbf {A}_{12} &\quad \mathbf {A}_{22} &\quad \dots &\quad \mathbf {A}_{M2}\\ \vdots &\quad \vdots &\quad \ddots &\quad \vdots \\ \mathbf {A}_{1M} &\quad \mathbf {A}_{2M} &\quad \dots &\quad \mathbf {A}_{MM} \end{array}\right). \end{equation} (10) The diagonal blocks Aii describe the interaction of all segments within the same borehole i with each other, that is, the effect of a single well as described in Section 2.1. All other blocks Aij where i ≠ j describe the interaction between any two wells i and j. For the calculation of the entries in the off-diagonal blocks we follow the general idea of eq. (2). Since the horizontal distances between two well segments is much larger than the horizontal dimensions of the well itself, integration over the Green's tensor in horizontal dimensions can be neglected. Hence, electrical currents can be assumed to resemble a vertical line source located at the centre of the segment: \begin{equation} A_{ij}=\pi \left(r_{a}^{2}-r_{i}^{2}\right)\int _{z_{i}-\frac{dz}{2}}^{z_{i}+\frac{dz}{2}}G_{zz}(x_{j},y_{j},z_{j}|x_{i},y_{i},z^{\prime }){\rm d}z^{\prime }, \end{equation} (11) which leads to \begin{eqnarray} A_{ij}&=&\frac{r_{a}^{2}-r_{i}^{2}}{4\sigma _{b}}\int _{0}^{\infty }\frac{k^{3}}{s^{2}}\left(2+e^{-s(z_{j}+z_{i}+\frac{dz}{2})}-e^{-s(z_{j}+z_{i}-\frac{dz}{2})}\right.\nonumber\\ &&\left.-\,\,e^{-s(z_{j}-z_{i}+\frac{dz}{2})}-e^{-s(-z_{j}+z_{i}+\frac{dz}{2})}\right)J_{0}(kd){\rm d}k, \end{eqnarray} (12) if |$z_{i}-\frac{dz}{2}