Carruthers, Dan¹
(1) The Permedia Research Group Inc, Ottawa, ON

ABSTRACT: Risking and Ranking Petroleum Migration Models

Anyone who has stood before an outcrop knows that all geological models are crude when compared the real world, incorporating considerable inherent elements of uncertainty. Petroleum migration modelling, like all modelling, is subject to these uncertainties. As a result, it is critical that models be evaluated through the execution of multiple realizations that sample the uncertainty. Without running multiple realizations, the risk that a model represents a less probable, outlier scenario is higher.
New techniques will be demonstrated to: (1)capture the effects of the dominant uncertainties in petroleum migration, and (2) apply objective functions to assess model output against reality
These techniques will include novel stochastic conditioning methods and the application of distributed processing to generate the required realizations, and the application of objective functions to discount the realizations that, while still within the specified scope of uncertainty, have failed to match a given objective (e.g., matching locations of known fields).

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90026©2004 AAPG Annual Meeting, Dallas, Texas, April 18-21, 2004.