3 Examples of Recent Advances in Petroleum System Modelling

Petroleum System Modelling (PSM) has to face various challenges: more and more physical phenomena must be modelled, whereas modelling workflows need to be optimized and made easier to follow.

We illustrate how we answer to these industry expectations by three examples of recent developments performed at IFPEN concerning Petroleum System Modelling: two recent developments to improve pressure prediction, and a recent developments to reduce modelling efforts.

Improvement of pressure prediction by decoupling porosity and geometry evolution is a new development concerning numerical schemes and has shown to be very efficient for calculating pressure in extreme cases of abnormal pressure.

Modelling of groundwater table shows that under certain circumstances, the effect of past groundwater table drop on present day overpressure distribution can be significant.

Finally, a new workflow based on ray-tracing migration modelling which operates on surface basin models instead of 3D volume meshes could be the basis of a quick-look migration modelling workflow suited for structurally complex basins, and by-passing 3D grid construction. This workflow prefigures what basin modelling will be in the future: it will rely on a variety of interconnected applications including geomodelling, stratigraphic modelling, structural restoration, usual and quick-look forward PSM, etc…