In seismic reservoir characterization, sonic measurements must be available at the wells that will be used to map the lateral extent of the reservoir. The acquisition and processing of sonic data is costly and can easily increase the required budget in a reservoir characterization campaign. Machine learning can help significantly reduce the need to pay for sonic logs.
The figures below are from a sonic and shear sonic prediction case study using existing gamma ray and density logs to train the machine learning model. The learning well is used to build the model. The application well prediction is completely independent of the well information used to build the model. Notice the 85% correlation for DTCO prediction and 83% correlation for DTSM. Histogram and crossplot comparisons between the measured and predicted logs are shown for quality control measures.