Estimating uncertainties in integrated reservoir studies

To make sound investment decisions, decision makers need accurate estimates of the uncertainties present in forecasts of reservoir performance. In this work I propose a method, the integrated mismatch method, that incorporates the misfit in the history match into the estimation of uncertainty in th...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Zhang, Guohong
Other Authors: McVay, Duane A.
Format: Others
Language:en_US
Published: Texas A&M University 2004
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/204
Description
Summary:To make sound investment decisions, decision makers need accurate estimates of the uncertainties present in forecasts of reservoir performance. In this work I propose a method, the integrated mismatch method, that incorporates the misfit in the history match into the estimation of uncertainty in the prediction. I applied the integrated mismatch method, which overcomes some deficiencies of existing methods, to uncertainty estimation in two reservoir studies and compared results to estimations from existing methods. The integrated mismatch method tends to generate smaller ranges of uncertainty than many existing methods. When starting from nonoptimal reservoir models, in some cases the integrated mismatch method is able to bracket the true reserves value while other methods fail to bracket it. The results show that even starting from a nonoptimal reservoir model, but as long as the experimental designs encompass the true case parameters, the integrated mismatch method brackets the true reserves value. If the experimental designs do not encompass all the true case parameters, but the true reserves value is covered by the experiments, the integrated mismatch method may still bracket the true case. This applies if there is a strong correlation between mismatch and closeness to the true reserves value. The integrated mismatch method does not need a large number of simulation runs for the uncertainty analysis, while some other methods need hundreds of runs.