Forecasting Water Breakthrough with a Reservoir Intelligence Platform

Our reservoir intelligence platform forecasts when a gas well will start producing water, and how much, years before it happens. Built entirely on data the operator already collects, it combines survival analysis, three-month early warning surveillance, and per-well volume forecasting, validated against Mari Energies own historical breakthrough records.

3–8%

production uplift

75%

breakthrough events caught years before

30–50%

reduction in facilities planning uncertainity

100%

audit trail coverage with ESG reporting

Business Overview and Strategic Direction

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Mari Energies, a major gas exploration and production operator, needed a better way to predict water breakthrough in a carbonate reservoir before it disrupted production and increased handling, treatment, disposal, and intervention costs. Conventional reservoir studies were too slow and infrequent for timely action.

Stixor developed a reservoir intelligence platform that uses existing production, completion, and petrophysical data to forecast breakthrough timing and water volumes. Validated against historical well data, the platform gives engineering teams months to years of lead time to plan workovers, prepare water handling capacity, and manage disposal requirements.

Operational Challenges in Gas Well Water Management

Forecasting water breakthrough on a carbonate reservoir demands long-horizon accuracy, honest uncertainty, and engineering trust. Key challenges:

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Late Discovery

Breakthrough was confirmed only after water volumes rose, leaving no lead time to plan a workover or size facilities.

Slow Simulation Cycles

Full reservoir simulation studies are expensive and rerun infrequently, so the operating picture ages every month.

No New Data Available

Any solution had to work from records already collected. New instrumentation or acquisition programmes were out of scope.

Engineering Trust

A forecast that fires false alarms, hides its misses, or implies false precision does not survive contact with a reservoir engineering team.

Three-Module Reservoir Intelligence Platform

One platform connects long term breakthrough forecasting, near term risk detection, and water volume planning, giving operators a clearer view of what is coming and time to act.

Our Solution

Long-Horizon Breakthrough Timing

Cox survival analysis, benchmarked against multiple statistical and ML models, forecasts breakthrough timing from geological and production data. P10/P50/P90 ranges give engineers a practical view of expected timing and uncertainty.

Three-Month Early Warning

The platform combines WGR trends, threshold momentum, next quarter WGR forecasts, and pressure decline through gradient boosting to identify wells approaching breakthrough with actionable three month lead time.

Water Volume Forecasting

Per well time series forecasting uses gas rate and wellhead pressure to estimate future water volumes. Monthly updates help operators plan water handling, treatment, disposal, and potential interventions.

01 Data Assessment and Definition

Audit of existing production, completion, petrophysical, and water chemistry records
Breakthrough threshold and labelling rules agreed with the operator's reservoir engineers
Feature engineering reviewed against reservoir physics, not selected on statistics alone

02 Model Development and Selection

Approximately 100 modelling configurations evaluated across feature sets, model families, and label definitions
Spud and live model modes built to serve day-one planning and mature-well surveillance
Retraining on the enhanced dataset brought average timing error to 1.4 years

03 Validation and Handover

Leave-one-well-out cross-validation: every prediction came from a model that never saw that well
Blind test on four wells with water data withheld until forecasts were locked
Platform handed over with documented methodology, ranked drivers, and a production roadmap