WELL LOG CORRELATION USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (RULE-BASED, EXPERT SYSTEM, COMPUTER-ASSISTED)

Computer-assisted approaches to well log correlation are of interest to petroleum engineers and geologists for two reasons. In large field studies a computer can be used to simply reduce the time required to correlate zones of interest. It is also possible that computer-assisted correlations may suggest zonal matches of interest and originality that might not have been considered. The objective of this study is to develop a new approach to computer-assisted log correlations. The new approach is based on a zonal correlation methodology and an artificial intelligence technique-- rule-based systems. A prototype rule-based computer software system is developed to implement this method. The system corre- lates logs in a fashion parallel to human experts. With this system, correlations are directly derived from the shapes of log traces. Results obtained from applying field data show that this new; approach can correlate distinct geological horizons with a high degree of success.; Citations adhere to the style of the Journal of Petroleum Technology.