Technology Focus: Reservoir Simulation (July 2010)

Abstract

Technology Focus At the 2009 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition held in New Orleans, I discovered at the Editorial Committee meeting that this Reservoir Simulation feature led the league table in terms of numbers of papers to review. This is a great indicator of the dynamism and innovation going on in our discipline, even if it did also make a pretty daunting task for your reviewer! We, therefore, agreed to spin off a separate feature on History Matching, which appeared in the April issue of JPT: Go back and check it out if you missed it. Despite this, I still had a large number of papers to choose from. Developments in our discipline cover a wide frontier, ranging from the physics of shale-gas reservoirs, to many approaches for improving computational efficiency, through workflow approaches for keeping models up to date and consistent. The underlying aims can be summed up best on the one hand as the relentless pursuit of more-predictive models through better physics and accuracy of reservoir description, and on the other hand as trying to achieve this aim ever more efficiently in terms of engineering and computational resources. As I mentioned last year, optimization continues to be a major topic, not just in history matching but also in prediction workflows. This is hardly surprising: Making optimal reservoir-management decisions is the main reason for doing reservoir simulation. Applying automation to the task can reduce the drudgery involved in trying many scenarios manually. Some operators are working toward a vision of integrating simulation models into systems that make operational decisions automatically or semiautomatically. Other operators prefer to gain general insight from more-general representative models and then make their decisions relying on engineering judgment. Whichever approach you take, the pressure to make every well pay in the current downturn means that there is renewed interest in many companies in applying higher levels of engineering and science. The challenge to us as reservoir engineers is to ensure that increased sophistication of engineering remains relevant and contributes to better field-management decisions. Reservoir Simulation additional reading available at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org SPE 127853 • “Uncertainty Evaluation in Emerging Gas Projects in North Africa Using Geological Modeling, Reservoir Simulation, and Experimental Design” by M. Vicente, Repsol YPF, et al. SPE 125568 • “Ensuring Water-Saturation Consistency Between Static (Fine-Grid) and Dynamic (Upscaled) Models—A Case Study of the North Kuwait Jurassic Complex” by Kassem Ghorayeb, Schlumberger, et al. SPE 125559 • “Upscaling in Partially Fractured Oil Reservoirs Using Homogenization” by Hamidreza Salimi, SPE, Delft University of Technology, et al.