Maximizing Asset Value: Integrating Geoscience with Reservoir Management & Facilities Optimization

Abstract

Integration across disciplines has long been recognized as key to maximizing asset value but few companies have managed to achieve this in practice across the full upstream E&P chain, or even across closely related disciplines. Furthermore, integration typically adds value when it creates new insight from bringing multiple disciplines together, that can be employed for a particular activity, but only if that insight is delivered in time to make a difference to the outcome of that activity. An integrated study that delivers a better field development plan may not be useful it takes 2 years longer than the economic or licensing constraints of the project allow. This talk will explore why integration brings value gains, referring to various aspects of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ integration. Soft integration refers to what can we do in the background to facilitate integration, which starts with good planning and good data management. Hard integration will be illustrated with examples of blending new technologies and old techniques that can bring great value but at their core demand technical integration of geoscience and various engineering disciplines. Soft integration can take many forms, but one example from the speaker’s personal experience illustrates how easy it is to lose massive asset value by not ensuring that everyone in the value chain understand and protect the value of the data your company may have created. Similarly, we will explore the loss of value from not having systems that ensure the whole team understands what results actually matter and which do not, and when. In an example of hard integration, an operator seeking safer drilling in a known hazardous province, combines seismic attribute analysis and petroleum systems modeling, adjusted as the drilling proceeds, to attempt to predict pore pressure and the fracture gradient with more certainty than from traditional techniques. In another example, a company combines forward geologic modeling with flow simulation, running thousands of realizations, in order to understand the likelihood of water breakthrough at various locations throughout the lifetime of the field

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90328 © 2018 AAPG Middle East Region GTW, Maximizing Asset Value: Integrating Geoscience with Reservoir Management & Facilities Optimization, Muscat, Oman, April 30 – May 1, 2018