A general approach for porosity estimation using artificial neural network method: a case study from Kansas gas field

This study aims to design a back-propagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN) to estimate the reliable porosity values from the well log data taken from Kansas gas field in the USA. In order to estimate the porosity, a neural network approach is applied, which uses as input sonic, density and resistivity log data, which are known to affect the porosity. This network easily sets up a relationship between the input data and the output parameters without having prior knowledge of petrophysical properties, such as pore-fluid type or matrix material type. The results obtained from the empirical relationship are compared with those from the neural network and a good correlation is observed. Thus, the ANN technique could be used to predict the porosity from other well log data.