Data Driven Reservoir Modeling

Author : James Dietrich
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781697429855
Total Pages : 293 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (298 download)

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Download or read book Reservoir Modeling written by James Dietrich and published by . This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are many excellent textbooks about the art of petroleum reservoir modeling or reservoir simulation. This is more of a technical narrative than a textbook. It's about pitfalls commonly encountered by subsurface modeling teams and how to avoid them. The book was written with graduate students in mind who are pursuing a degree in petroleum engineering or earth science. Much of the material is new and can not be found elsewhere. The author is well aware that practicing an art is a creative endeavor that is filled with interpretation, not fact. Opinion is infused throughout the narrative. But at least the author's opinions on what went wrong in a myriad of projects are based on long personal experience. In every one of the example projects, the author was present on-site as a team member throughout the modeling effort. The example projects are major, 8 in number and located in North America, the Norwegian North Sea, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. My career was 50 years in oil as a reservoir engineer, from 1966 to 2016. It covered the gamut from roughneck, to operations, to research and finally to international consulting. The first 10 years were with Shell Oil and Shell Development Companies, most of the next 10 years were with Todd, Dietrich & Chase, Inc. and the last 30 years were worked as The Dietrich Corporation. I knew reservoir modeling was for me after building the first major reservoir model for Shell Oil Company in 1970. The attraction was not surprising. My academic credentials in geology and engineering science were a perfect fit with the emerging technology of reservoir simulation. The overall chronology just described was recently told in a memoir titled Too Much by Half -- The Coming Cut in Proved Oil Reserves (Dietrich 2019), published by Amazon. That book tells my view of how reserves have become systematically inflated, aside from any influence of rising oil prices. It's actually part way between memoir and non-fiction -- too much of one to be properly the other. Dubbed narrative non-fiction, that tome was written for non-technical readers who are generally interested in the "peak oil" debate, an international consulting career, or simply expat living. This book is a sequel. Its content is highly technical in nature. Its genre is somewhere between a textbook and narrative non-fiction -- again, too much of one to be properly the other. It shares modeling experience of the author gained while working as The Dietrich Corporation, embedded in modeling teams of clients in 16 countries over a period of two decades. At the heart of both narratives is the struggle between reservoir engineers and geologists for control of the reservoir modeling process. That power play has now reached an end. Rules of the modeling game have quietly been changed by its new masters -- earth scientists. During the prior reign of engineering, oil trapped in poor quality rock was excluded from reserves. That oil was known to be present, but it was cut-out of the models because it could not be made to flow. It was not considered to be a portion of proven reserves. That was the status for decades. Under the new dominion of earth science, oil stored in poor quality rock is entered into the reservoir models and made available by combining it with the better quality rock. I call this process Moonbeam Modeling. It's like making high risk junk bonds valuable to investors by combining them with bonds rated AAA to A and marketing the lot as bonds rated BBB to B -- still good enough to attract capital. The difficult to move junk bonds and inaccessible oil can both be made to "flow" by fictitiously upgrading them.