PTRL3002: Reservoir Characterisation

Assignment 1

This individual assignment should be submitted via Moodle as single file; use as filename PTRL3002_zID_RCass1, replacing ID with
your student number.

Q1. Grid design.

a. [10 marks] Discuss the difference between a regular in plan shifted in depth and a regular in plan stretched in depth
grid design for a particular formation.
b. [10 marks] How does the choice of the grid affect the modelling of transport properties, namely permeability?

Q2. Consider the sonic log given in the course notes on page 85.

a. (10 marks) Choose 50 points at random from the dataset and derive the histogram of the sample. Calculate mean and
standard deviation. Add another 50 points – does the addition of these points improve the definition of the histogram?
b. (10 marks) Calculate the variogram scatterplot for the DT data (100 points) and fit an experimental variogram model to
the data; consider exponential, spherical, and Gaussian variograms and report range, nugget.

Q3. You are designing a reservoir model for a rough prediction of reservoir performance for an 8km x 8km field. Five wells have
been drilled. A high-permeability layer has been identified and its thickness at the well locations is given in Fig. 1 in stratigraphic
coordinates.

Figure 1: Reservoir thickness map. The thickness of the reservoir layer is given in meters for well locations A to E. The central
location X with coordinates (4km, 4km) is unknown.

a. (10 marks) Estimate the layer thickness at location marked in the centre (X) using the nearest neighbour algorithm and
explain your approach.
b. (10 marks) Use the triangulation method with inverse distance weighting and standard exponent ‘2’ to estimate the
value at X, including only the vertices of the triangle. Estimate the error associated with this method by cross-validation.
c. (10 marks) Compare your uncertainty estimate with an estimation of the Kriging variance at that location. Use as sill the
theoretical variance of the dataset, a range of 5km, and a Gaussian variogram model.
d. (10 marks) Explain how you would derive a set of realisations for the layer thickness using sequential Gaussian
simulation.