FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS

The main goal of this project was to begin a collaborative effort between various disciplines including (1) geological reservoir modeling (2) fluid flow simulation (3) rock physics, and (4) seismic imaging to explore and understand how reservoir monitoring may be used as a tool for efficient reservoir management. Seismic monitoring promises to provide valuable information about reservoir fluid movements and reservoir geological heterogeneities. However, issues of resolution, scales, and uncertainties need to be explored.

Our preliminary results warrant further research in this direction. Future work will address the following issues:

• Using seismic monitoring to constrain geological models and reduce the uncertainty in reservoir performance forecasting. In the context of stochastic reservoir modeling, flow simulation is performed with alternative equally-probable reservoir geologic models. The uncertainty in future reservoir performance is measured by the differences in flow simulation outcomes. The information provided by seismic monitoring data will possibly reduce this uncertainty by constraining the reservoir geological models.
• In this study we performed steps A through D of the reservoir-to-seismic modeling flow loop shown in Fig.  on a single geological realization. Future work should address the computationally challenging issue of closing this loop by considering multiple geostatistical realizations. This task will be feasible only if sufficient resources are available for the computationally intensive seismic imaging and fluid flow simulations, and efficient algorithms are developed to model the process with an acceptable resolution at the relevant scales.
• Estimating uncertainties due to non-unique assignment of acoustic properties from the reference lithofacies, porosity, and saturations. Laboratory experience has demonstrated that seismic properties depend not only on pore fluid saturations, but also on the scales of their spatial distributions. The impact of this at field scales must be explored. This project highlighted the need for better methods of upscaling not only the rock and reservoir properties, but also the rock physics relations between these properties and the seismic observables.
• At the essence of seismic monitoring is the capability of analyzing the differences between seismic images obtained from data sets recorded at different times, with possibly variable acquisition geometry, waveform, bandwidth, and coherent noise. Methods to remove the effects of all these perturbations must be developed to enable seismic monitoring to reduce the uncertainties of reservoir characterization.

We envision that future work in this area will (1) build on the multi-disciplinary collaboration already started, involving students from the different departments (2) consider real reservoir data, and (3) provide fertile grounds for applicable solutions to reservoir management problems.