Development of a convolutional neural network based geomechanical upscaling technique for heterogeneous geological reservoir

Geomechanical assessment using coupled reservoir-geomechanical simulation is becoming increasingly important for analyzing the potential geomechanical risks in subsurface geological developments. However, a robust and efficient geomechanical upscaling technique for heterogeneous geological reservoirs is lacking to advance the applications of three-dimensional (3D) reservoir-scale geomechanical simulation considering detailed geological heterogeneities. Here, we develop convolutional neural network (CNN) proxies that reproduce the anisotropic nonlinear geomechanical response caused by lithological heterogeneity, and compute upscaled geomechanical properties from CNN proxies. The CNN proxies are trained using a large dataset of randomly generated spatially correlated sand-shale realizations as inputs and simulation results of their macroscopic geomechanical response as outputs. The trained CNN models can provide the upscaled shear strength (R2 > 0.949), stress-strain behavior (R2 > 0.925), and volumetric strain changes (R2 > 0.958) that highly agree with the numerical simulation results while saving over two orders of magnitude of computational time. This is a major advantage in computing the upscaled geomechanical properties directly from geological realizations without the need to perform local numerical simulations to obtain the geomechanical response. The proposed CNN proxy-based upscaling technique has the ability to (1) bridge the gap between the fine-scale geocellular models considering geological uncertainties and computationally efficient geomechanical models used to assess the geomechanical risks of large-scale subsurface development, and (2) improve the efficiency of numerical upscaling techniques that rely on local numerical simulations, leading to significantly increased computational time for uncertainty quantification using numerous geological realizations.