Abstract
The estimation of the formation permeability is considered a vital process in assessing reservoir deliverability. The prediction of such a rock property with the use of the minimum number of inputs is mandatory. In general, porosity and permeability are independent rock petrophysical properties. Despite these observations, theoretical relationships have been proposed, such as that by the Kozeny-Carmen theory. This theory, however, treats a highly complex porous medium in a very simple manner. Hence, this study proposes a comprehensive ANN model based on the back propagation learning algorithm using the FORTRAN language to predict the formation permeability from available well logs. The proposed ANN model uses a weight visualization curve technique to optimize the number of hidden neurons and layers. Approximately 500 core data points were collected to generate the model. These data, including gamma ray, sonic travel time, and bulk density, were collected from numerous wells drilled in the Western Desert and Gulf areas of Egypt. The results show that in order to predict the permeability accurately, the data set must be divided into 60% for training, 20% for testing, and 20% for validation with 25 neurons. The results yielded a correlation coefficient (R-2) of 98% for the training and 96.5% for the testing, with an average absolute percent relative error (AAPRE) of 2.4%. To validate the ANN model, two published correlations (i.e., the dual water and Timur's models) for calculating permeability were used to achieve the target. In addition, the results show that the ANN model had the lowest mean square error (MSE) of 0.035 and AAPRE of 0.024, while the dual water model yielded the highest MSE of 0.84 and APPRE of 0.645 compared to the core data. These results indicate that the proposed ANN model is robust and has strong capability of predicting the rock permeability using the minimum number of wireline log data.