Screening of Geological Uncertainty on Reservoir Dynamic Behavior with Statistical Learning Techniques

A statistical screening methodology is presented to address uncertainty related to main geological assumptions in green field modeling. The goals are the identification of the entire range of uncertainty on production, learning which are the most impacting geological uncertain inputs and understanding the relationships between geological scenarios and classes of dynamic behavior. The paper presents the methodology and an example application to a green field case study. The method is applied on an ensemble of reservoir models created by combining geological parameters across their range of uncertainty. The ensemble of models is then simulated with a selected development strategy and dynamic responses are grouped in classes of outcome through clustering algorithms. Ensemble responses are visualized on a multidimensional stacking plot, as a function of the geological input, and the most influential parameters are identified by axes sorting on the plot. Geological scenarios are then classified on dynamic responses through classification tree algorithms. Finally, a representative set of models is selected from the geological scenarios. The example study application shows a final oil recovery uncertainty range of 4:1, which is reasonable for a green field in lack of data. Such high range of uncertainty could hardly be found by common risk assessment based on fixed geological assumptions, which often tend to underestimate uncertainty on forecasts. Ensemble outcomes are grouped in four classes by oil recovery, plateau strength, produced water, and breakthrough time. The adoption of such clustering features gives a broad understanding of the reservoir dynamic response. The most influential geological inputs among the examined structural and sedimentological parameters in the example application result to be the fault orientation and channel fraction. This screening result highlights the main drivers of geological uncertainty and is useful for the following scenario classification phase. Classification of the geological scenarios leads to five classes of geological parameter sets, each linked to a main class of dynamic behavior, and finally to five representative models. These five models constitute an effective sampling of the geological uncertainty space which also captures the different types of dynamic response. This paper will contribute to widen the engineering experience on the use of machine learning for risk analysis by presenting an application on a real field case study to explore the relationship between geological uncertainty and reservoir dynamic behavior.