Chevron U.s.a. Inc.

Rafael Salazar-Tio

Boqin Q Sun

Mark Skalinski

Robert Mallan

Systems and methods for generating permeability scaling function for different features of interest are disclosed. Exemplary implementations may: obtain subsurface data sets; generate permeability scaling functions for individual features of interest; store the permeability scaling functions; and generate upscaled subsurface distributions using the permeability scaling functions.

Systems and methods for generating permeability scaling functions to estimate permeability

A system and method for multi-phase segmentation of noisy 3D x-ray tomography images representative of porous material minimizing data smoothing which processes 3D x-ray tomography images to obtain a standardized intensity image, segments the standardized intensity image into at least 3 phases, calculates volumetric fractions and spatial distributions of the segmented phases and compares them with target values, and if the calculated fractions are not close enough to the target values, repeats the necessary segmentation steps until the calculated volumetric fractions are within a given tolerance to the target values. The segmentation steps include computing a median/mean-filtered-gradient image of the standardized intensity image, creating an intensity vs. gradient graph from the median/mean-filtered-gradient image and the standardized intensity image, partitioning the intensity vs. gradient graph into at least 3 regions, using thresholds defining the regions to segment the standardized grey scale image to create a segmented image, and applying a despeckler filter to remove noise in the segmented image.

System and method for multi-phase segmentation of density images representing porous media

The present invention enables the use of a global optimization method for performing joint-inversion of multiple petrophysical data sets, using forward models based on first principle of physics, to generate a 3D rock representation of a subsurface rock structure. The resulting 3D rock representation captures the internal structure, and honors the measured petrophysical properties, of the subsurface rock structure. The 3D rock representation can then be used to predict additional properties not considered in the inversion, to further characterize the subsurface rock structure.

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San Ramon, CA, United States of America

Rafael Salazar-Tio