Abstract
Abstract In the current oil price situation it is particularly important to improve the reliability of reservoir forecasts to make better field development decisions. The great challenge of reservoir modelling is to account for geological uncertainty to increase reliability of the predictions. The aim of this paper is to explore and answer three important questions that tackle this challenge and affect reservoir predictions. The first question is: to what extent does geological realism matter to reservoir predictions? To estimate the value of geological realism to reservoir predictions we introduce hierarchical geological realism into facies modelling. It allows us to account for geological realism at three different levels: 1) multiple possible geological concepts, 2) geological consistency of each geological concept, 3) geologically realistic relations of model parameters, such as: geobodies dimensions and facies proportions. Implementation of multiple possible geological concepts allows us to include interpretational uncertainty for more realistic predictions. The second question is: how to maintain geological realism during model update? Automated history matching requires model updates to achieve a good match between observed and simulated data. Geological realism can easily be lost during a model perturbation whilst history matching. We aim to maintain geological realism through model the update process by using a metric space approach. Classification of models in the metric space provides geologically realistic differentiation between multiple possible geological concepts. The result of the classification allows us to predict a geologically realistic model description through the model update process. Finally, we ask: can geological realism improve the reliability of the forecast? To answer this question we test the hierarchical approach in automated history matching on a West Coast of Africa reservoir. The results validate the choice of geological scenario and improve the reliability of the forecast.
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