Uncertainty Quantification: Are We Doing it Right?

There is no more easy oil! This means when we find hydrocarbons today it is a risky business …. small reservoirs, tight reservoirs, deep reservoirs etc. It is therefore more important than ever to quantify the risk associated with each prospect. Practically this means evaluating the uncertainty in our reservoir models. For more than a decade now software vendors have been providing tools to aid in the evaluation of uncertainty. With time these tools have become easier to use and cover a broader range of the modeling process. Despite this, uncertainty quantification has had limited adoption across the industry and tends to lie in the hands of a few experts. There is a shortage of best practice procedures and we can be sure that many mistakes are being made. This presentation will start by laying out the principal workflows and open up for discussion important questions such as:  How do we decide which of the multitude of parameters we should focus on?  How do we combine scenarios with realizations?  What strategies are available to link the static uncertainty with the dynamic?  How can Uncertainty play a role in history matching and prediction?  What is the role of optimization?