Geostatiscal Methods for Reservoir Modeling

The continued tightening of oil field economics and the rising risks associated with field development have continued to place greater emphasis on the accuracy of reservoir models for economic analysis and production planning. With the increasing use of 3-D seismic data and the availability of workstation technology, a series of geostatistical tools has evolved to replace the deterministic methods for distributing petrophysical parameters within the densely sampled seismic data volume. This results in higher certainty in the derived reservoir models. As a consequence, the practitioner is faced with a myriad of new tools, each with specific limitations and applicability. This paper outlines the major methods and discusses their applicability over the exploration - production life cycle