Web-Portal Reservoir Knowledge Base Integrates Engineering, Production, Geoscience, and Economics Data Sets
Authors: Denney Dennis 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by Senior Technology Editor Dennis Denney, contains highlights of paper SPE 146166, ’Innovative Web-Portal Reservoir Knowledge Base Integrates Engineering, Production, Geoscience, and Economics Data Sets,’ by D. Rees, SPE, J. Reichardt, and A. O'Carroll, Knowledge Reservoir, prepared for the 2011 SPE Offshore Europe Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition, Aberdeen, 6-8 September. The paper has not been peer reviewed.

A Web portal has been created for a North Sea area knowledge base of reservoir and engineering data. This knowledge base can assist in evaluating prospects and projects, assessing development risks, and measuring prospects against other opportunities in the company portfolio. Operators in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GOM) have a similar resource when researching analog fields. With an extendable data model to manage structured and unstructured data, this framework can ensure that exploration and asset teams can access all data of immediate interest and can highlight other key knowledge related to a specific prospect, appraisal, or development evaluation.     

Introduction

The North Sea continues to be an arena rich in potential exploration-and-development activity. Improved technology is a driving factor in improving the risk/reward ratio of these opportunities. However, with the levels of investment required, the complexity of the environment, and the changing market, it is critical to make an accurate appraisal of each prospect before making an investment decision. Before any lease sale or partnership proposal is made, a critical factor driving development decisions and the ultimate financial feasibility of a project is reservoir quality. Portfolio managers within each oil and gas company are constrained by corporate guidelines for assessing the risk/return profiles of every prospect and have ranking guidelines aligned with the company’s business objectives and risk tolerance.

The first step is to identify correlation parameters and to use them in selecting comparable analog reservoirs. Without taking care in this filtering process, there is a risk of producing flawed comparisons and meaningless predictions. Normally, several key geotechnical parameters are considered. The first set of criteria is geological, including the geographical location, age, province, depth, depositional facies, and sedimentology. Other criteria include rock and fluid parameters, pressure, temperature, gradients, drive mechanism, and other physical or engineering parameters. Such analogs provide insights into potential production issues of the reservoir.

Accessible Analog Data

The analog aspect of a knowledge-based approach works well only when there are sufficient well-analyzed analog fields to provide the necessary correlations. In the deepwater GOM, the knowledge-based effort is supported by the large amount of high-quality historical data supplied by operators to the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement and made available to the public under the US Freedom of Information Act. This information includes limited analyses by operators, particularly values for expected ultimate recovery. These values should be treated with caution because they are technical and financial indicators. Depending on the operator, there can be a large bias that reflects the company’s fiscal reporting policies. In the North Sea area, production data are available from the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change and from the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate.