Development of a General Package for Resolution of Uncertainty-Related Issues in Reservoir Engineering

Abstract

Reservoir simulations always involve a large number of parameters to characterize the properties of formation and fluid, many of which are subject to uncertainties owing to spatial heterogeneity and insufficient measurements. To provide solutions to uncertainty-related issues in reservoir simulations, a general package called GenPack has been developed. GenPack includes three main functions required for full stochastic analysis in petroleum engineering, generation of random parameter fields, predictive uncertainty quantifications and automatic history matching. GenPack, which was developed in a modularized manner, is a non-intrusive package which can be integrated with any existing commercial simulator in petroleum engineering to facilitate its application. Computational efficiency can be improved both theoretically by introducing a surrogate model-based probabilistic collocation method, and technically by using parallel computing. A series of synthetic cases are designed to demonstrate the capability of GenPack. The test results show that the random parameter field can be flexibly generated in a customized manner for petroleum engineering applications. The predictive uncertainty can be reasonably quantified and the computational efficiency is significantly improved. The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF)-based automatic history matching method can improve predictive accuracy and reduce the corresponding predictive uncertainty by accounting for observations.