AccScience Publishing / JSE / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/JSE026220093
ARTICLE

Intelligent joint prediction of elastic and petrophysical parameters in sandstone reservoirs

Yang Zhang1* Hong Cao2* Zhifang Yang1 Hao Yang1 Qiang Ge1 Yuqi Qiu1 Jiangbei Huang3 Sen Zhao1
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1 Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration and Development, Beijing, China
2 Bureau of Geophysical Prospecting INC., Zhuozhou, Hebei, China
3 PetroChina Hangzhou Research Institute of Geology, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
Received: 27 May 2026 | Revised: 9 July 2026 | Accepted: 28 July 2026 | Published online: 10 August 2026
© 2026 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Quantitative estimation of reservoir parameters from seismic observations is a primary objective of reservoir characterization. Accurate prediction of reservoir elastic and petrophysical parameters is of great significance for reservoir evaluation, sweet-spot identification, and subsequent development deployment. However, conventional stepwise seismic inversion methods are prone to error accumulation during the propagation from elastic-parameter inversion to petrophysical-parameters prediction. Although various simultaneous inversion methods have been proposed, deep learning-based approaches that simultaneously estimate elastic and petrophysical properties while incorporating rock physics constraints and seismic forward consistency remain relatively limited. We propose an intelligent multi-parameter joint inversion method (MPJ-Inv) for seismic reservoirs to jointly predict P-wave velocity, S-wave velocity, density, porosity, gas saturation, and shale volume. Specifically, a rock-physics model that accounts for stiff and soft pores was introduced, and a forward operator from petrophysical parameters to seismic data was constructed by combining this model with a linearized approximation of the Zoeppritz equation. In terms of network architecture, an end-to-end joint inversion network composed of an elastic-parameters prediction module and a petrophysical-parameters prediction module was developed. After the elastic-parameters prediction module obtained the elastic parameters, they were used as guiding information and combined with the initial petrophysical model to simultaneously predict petrophysical parameters. During network training, a semi-supervised strategy was adopted. At well locations, well-log labels were used to monitor both elastic and petrophysical parameters; at non-well locations, synthetic seismic data were generated using the forward operator and compared with the observed seismic records. In addition, a rock-physics consistency constraint was introduced to ensure agreement between the elastic and petrophysical parameters predicted by the network, thereby reducing the ill-posedness of the inversion to some extent. Tests on a synthetic seismic dataset and a tight sandstone gas reservoir dataset from Southwest China showed that, compared with conventional sequential inversion, the proposed method achieved higher accuracy, providing an effective reference for joint prediction of sandstone reservoirs.

Keywords
Seismic inversion
Rock physics
Tight sandstones
Reservoir prediction
Deep learning
Funding
This research was funded by the CNPC Science and Technology Major Project (grant nos. 2023ZZ05, 2023ZZ05-05, 2023ZZ18-03).
Conflict of interest
Hong Cao works at the Bureau of Geophysical Prospecting and has no conflict of interest with this research. The authors declare they have no competing interests.
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Journal of Seismic Exploration, Print ISSN: 0963-0651, Published by AccScience Publishing