New Approach to Validate History Matching Process Available to Purchase

Conducting a history matching process is the most challenging and time consuming phase for reservoir simulation domain. It is worthy to invest more efforts to introduce new approaches to validate history matching results. This to guaranty the 3D model calibration has been adapted to adequate level that will minimize associated risk for the proposed forecast that completely rely on the history matching quality.

This paper is describing a new approach for validating history matching results. It describes new workflow that is used to integrate all historical information comes from field surveillance and shows change of fluid distribution over field production history, e.g. observation of oil water contact encroachment, water coning, etc.

Petrel™ as a 3D modeling package is used to integrate all of these information in automated way to build conceptual 3D fluid distribution models at selected time increments that represent the field production history. The workflow has two main steps, 1^st to use geo-statistical approach to interpolate available fluid change surveillances at well level to build fluid contact surfaces at selected time increments. 2^nd step, Petrel™ will use each contact surface individually to build corresponding 3D conceptual fluid distribution model to describe fluid profile in 3D at a time.

These conceptual models will simulate the overall mechanism of subsurface fluid movements over the production history based on the available historical data. By the end, the generated conceptual 3D fluid distribution models can be used to validate the fluid saturation models come from any finite difference simulator. It will do help to have better understanding of field performance in response to fluid contact change. In additional; It can guide a preliminary plan to propose infill wells for field development plans.

This paper shows a detailed workflow of a mechanistic study to cover this new approach of validating the History Matching process and shed a light on the challenges and limitations of this new approach.