The risk of economic failure of infill drilling campaigns increases with the increasing maturity of an oil field. The increased risk is due to the lower remaining movable oil in the late stages of a field's life compared to earlier phases. Despite the additional information owing to drilling of wells and production history, substantial geological and dynamic uncertainties remain. In this paper, an approach is presented for selecting an infill well portfolio of 10 wells from a total of 96 that explicitly accounts for these uncertainties.
The geological uncertainty can be exposed by generating a multitude of geological models conditioned to known log/correlation data. These models need to be classified and a subset of representative models extracted that in turn are calibrated (history matched) to past field performance and then used for forecasting. Calibration using a suitable ensemble of representative geological models aims to maintain geological diversity while reducing the error to historical data through an objective function.
Probabilistic Property Maps can then be generated to identify potential infill well locations. Probabilistic maps offer a major improvement compared to selection of infill well locations using a single geological realization. For mature assets, forecasting requires simulation of incremental oil recovery since infill wells represent incremental projects over a base case. Using an appropriate ensemble of models allows probabilistic representation of the incremental oil production and associated economics.
First, individual infill well performances are forecasted. Next, the individual infill well locations are evaluated taking the history matching error into account and using utility theory to cover the risk adverseness attitude of the company. Doing so enables selection of an infill well portfolio under uncertainty and leads to a selection of well locations carrying lower risk compared to a selection of locations neglecting history match error and/or disregarding the risk attitude of a company.
