Three-Dimensional Reservoir Description From Multiwell Pressure Data and Prior Information

Abstract

Summary Bayesian estimation techniques are applied to generate three-dimensional permeability and porosity fields conditioned to prior means, variograms, hard data and/or multiwell pressure data. A posteriori variances are generated to obtain a measure of the uncertainty in the rock property fields, or equivalently, a measure of the variability in realizations of the rock property fields. These a posteriori variances can also be used to quantify the value of data, i.e., to determine the reduction in uncertainty achieved by adding a particular type of data. A key ingredient of our methodology is the development and implementation of an efficient procedure to estimate sensitivity coefficients for three-dimensional single-phase flow problems.