Reservoir Characterization: Challenges and Opportunities
Authors: Goins Neal R. 
Published: October 2008

It wasn't all that many years ago that geoscience was viewed primarily as an exploration technology with only a minor role in development and production. In those days, moving to a production assignment was a new and risky venture for a geoscientist. Since then, increasing economic challenges and revolutions in technology have completely altered that landscape. Today, reservoir characterization provides the foundation for development and production decisions, and multidisciplinary integrated teams are the norm.

With all that progress, major advances still lie ahead driven by economic need, new technologies, data management and visualization techniques, and most importantly, new ways or working together. For industry, the outcome will be to continue to reduce costs and resolve heretofore intractable complexities, thereby extending our reach to more resources. For the individual practitioner, this dynamic situation presents wide-open opportunities for creative thinking, innovation, contribution, and career growth.

Discussion

There are strong business and economic drivers for improving both the technologies for reservoir characterization and our abilities to apply them effectively. Cost-efficiently increasing recovery factors from maturing fields is an ongoing need as new resources become harder and more expensive to find and develop. As exploration moves rapidly to deeper water and more remote areas, the ability to assess not only prospect size but reservoir distribution and characteristics becomes critical to strategic direction of the exploration program. With success, early and accurate reservoir characterization is the key to optimizing development plans and achieving maximum economic benefit. The fact that many recent key deepwater discoveries are channelized increases the technological challenge. Overall, an integrated ability to understand and manage the subsurface is the key to being a partner of choice as governments develop their resources.

The technologies and resulting tools for reservoir characterization continue to develop and expand. The proliferation of 3D data has been a fundamental enabler. Not only has it provided a far more accurate picture of the subsurface in general, but it has also informed major advances in our understanding of structural and stratigraphic processes and outcomes by providing more and richer datasets. Advances in these geologic system models are in turn driving a better understanding of likely distributions of reservoir properties. 3D datasets have also motivated intense efforts to extract more quantitative information about the physical properties of the subsurface. The success of geostatistical techniques such as neural nets clearly demonstrates that the seismic data carry a tremendous amount of information that we are not able to extract deterministically. The research required to understand and further exploit the underlying physics revealed by the geostatistical correlations is just beginning. Failures of geostatistical techniques in various situations can be equally revealing and raise clear questions about how to assess data sufficiency and technique applicability. Extensions of the 3D datasets to 4D and 4C are ongoing and have had a variety of successes, but often hover on the edge of economic justifiability pending cost reductions and better ways to capture benefits.