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Structural Uncertainty Integration within Reservoir Risk Analysis and History

Matching

Conference Paper · November 2014

DOI: 10.2118/170761-MS

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SPE-170761-MS

Structural Uncertainty Integration within Reservoir Risk Analysis and

History Matching
R. Sabatino, E. Viviani, E. Della Rossa, C. Sala, and A. Maffioli, Eni E&P

Copyright 2014, Society of Petroleum Engineers

This paper was prepared for presentation at the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 27–29 October 2014.

This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE program committee following review of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s). Contents
of the paper have not been reviewed by the Society of Petroleum Engineers and are subject to correction by the author(s). The material does not necessarily reflect
any position of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, its officers, or members. Electronic reproduction, distribution, or storage of any part of this paper without the written
consent of the Society of Petroleum Engineers is prohibited. Permission to reproduce in print is restricted to an abstract of not more than 300 words; illustrations may
not be copied. The abstract must contain conspicuous acknowledgment of SPE copyright.

Abstract
Reservoir structural modelling is one of the fundamental steps in a reservoir study workflow. The impact
of the structural uncertainties on the dynamic response of the reservoir is well known and not negligible,
but often the reservoir shape is considered as fixed due to the complexity to manage alternative geological
structures in multi-realisations simulation loop. Nevertheless, both Risk Analysis (RA) and History
Matching (HM) workflows strongly require a practical and time-effective methodology for structure
management with an efficient uncertain geometry parameterization. In this work, an innovative method-
ology for structural uncertainty handling is presented. The methodology is based on the combination of
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Elastic Gridding. In particular, the PCA-based parameterization
is able to efficiently handle the geophysical uncertainty model, consistent with the geostatistical charac-
terization as well. Such methodology has been structured in an internally developed tool. This tool is
specifically designed for a direct handling of corner point geometry grids and allows changes of surfaces,
shape and size of internal reservoir layers, fault throw and fault position and even new fault placement,
honouring geological constraints. One of the key points of the proposed methodology is the integration
of a geologically-oriented parameterization and a statistical parameters reduction technique (the above
mentioned PCA) in a workflow which includes commercial HM/RA tool and a dynamic simulator. The
result is an efficient structural uncertainty management framework suitable for Risk Analysis and History
Matching studies. Among the field applications performed so far, two cases have been chosen aiming at
showing the potentialities of the proposed approach. The first example is a history matching exercise on
an undersatured oil reservoir. A comparison between the traditional and the “structural”, even if
simplified, HM is herein provided, showing the improvement due to a better geologically-oriented
uncertainty model. The second example is a risk analysis application on an oil field, with a strong
uncertainty of the oil in place due to lack of accurate knowledge of the reservoir flanks shape. The
application highlights the advantages deriving from the geophysical PCA-based workflow.

Introduction
The dynamical impact of Structural Uncertainty is well known and not negligible, but often it is not
considered in history matching because of its very complex management within the dynamical models.
2 SPE-170761-MS

Indeed, the reservoir geometry is typically kept fixed, and the history matching workflow is usually
implemented with a single deterministic reservoir structure. This approach mainly arises from the
sequence of operations performed in reservoir structural modelling (interpretation of seismic data,
building of the 3D frame, population of the grid with petrophysical properties, upscaling, etc.) which
makes very difficult a continuous update of the structural modelling in the framework of an optimization
loop. Moreover, the commercial availability of integrated modelling tool is very limited.
The “big loop” approach is a methodology suggested by some authors (see for example Hanea et al.,
2013) which aims at building an integrated reservoir modelling chain (from Geophysics and Geology to
Reservoir Engineering) that is automated, consistent and updateable. In this way, all the steps of reservoir
modelling (from Surface and Fault modelling to Geomodelling, from reservoir simulation to ensemble
methods) are unified within a single automatic workflow which requires a strong multidisciplinary
collaboration among engineers and geoscientists.
This approach seems to be the way forward, but it involves an all-embracing software chain that is still
not available in standard software packages.
To overcome this issue, a more straightforward approach is presented in this paper, based on the
combination of elastic gridding and an innovative parameterization of the structural uncertainty.
The elastic gridding approach (Seiler et al., 2009, 2010) is a way to parameterize the structural features
such that an existing grid, defined with a corner point geometry, is deformed to account for the uncertainty
of faults, surfaces (defining the reservoir top or bottom) or any other geometrical feature of internal layers.
The existing grid usually represents a most likely scenario for structural geometry interpretation of
reservoir model and the perturbation acts directly on grid nodes.
The main advantage of this approach is the unaltered topology of the grid cells, hence no redistribution
of the petrophysical properties is required. From this point of view, the elastic gridding is a quicker way
to update the structure than the big loop, even if the elastic gridding may impact on a reduced scale if
compared to the comprehensive approach of the big loop. Nonetheless, if a reliable structural uncertainty
parameterization has been adopted, the proposed approach is able to establish a direct link between the
structural uncertainties and their impact on reservoir models (for instance, the impact of a specific
structural feature on the oil in place).
However, even for the elastic gridding there is a very limited availability of dedicated software
packages. For this reason, an internally developed tool was used aimed at creating an integrated workflow
where the flow simulator is directly linked to the warped model without manual re-interpretation and
re-distribution of petrophysical properties.
History Match Workflow with elastic gridding
The standard history matching workflow, which consists of the steps summarized in Table 1, is formally
the same for structural history match (Figure 1). The main difference is given by the structure update, as
each set of structural parameters leads to the creation of a new grid. The update of the structure is
performed by the in-house tool which firstly creates the new grid file according to the parameters and then
makes the grid available for the flow simulator.
The entire workflow can be developed with standard commercial software packages with the exception
of the elastic gridding that is currently implemented with an in-house tool in order to get the parameters
from a Computer-Assisted HM (CAHM) software and the final output is a dynamic grid in the format
required from the flow simulator.
The elastic gridding approach
Within the framework of the elastic gridding, several deformations to the original grid may be applied
without altering the grid blocks topology, hence no properties re-population of the reservoir cells is
required.
SPE-170761-MS 3

Table 1—History Matching workflow

In this section, a short summary of the approach

main features is given, such as the allowed grid
deformations and the handling of constraints at well
and reservoir scale.
Grid deformations
A pictorial description of the technique is provided
in Figure 2 where a vertical section of a simple
corner point grid geometry is given. In Figure 2, the
green lines represent the top and bottom surfaces of
the reservoir model, the blue line is the projection in
the vertical section of the fault surface (a simple
vertical plane in this example) while the grid is
plotted in grey. On the left the original (i.e. the most
Figure 1—History Matching workflow.
likely) scenario is depicted, while on the right some
examples of elastic grid deformations are provided,
according to the direction suggested by the red arrows.
As visualized in the schematic representation of typical elastic grid deformations, the relevant structural
feature changes are not confined to the cells directly connected to the modified geometry, but they are
distributed in a wider range of model cells always considering the grid pillars and along the coordinate
directions.
The issue can be clarified considering more in detail, for example, the modification of the fault position
as given in Figure 3. The position of a fault as uncertain parameter is mainly modelled with a vector of
displacement (the red arrows in Figure 3).
On top of that, a perturbation zone must be identified, i.e. a region where the grid warping is allowed
(the white double arrows) in order to spread the effect of the fault modification and avoid an excessive
cell distortion. In the example no further modifications are applied for cells over a distance of 4 from the
faults (assuming as measure of distance the index of the cells).
According to this choice, the cell shape changes in a limited and controlled grid area, avoiding at the
same time too much local distortion.

Constraints and contacts

It should be noted that several constraints have to be honoured by the changes introduced by elastic
gridding, especially for the cells near the wells.
4 SPE-170761-MS

Figure 2—Examples of Elastic Gridding: on the left reference grid, on the right bottom surface, fault throw and fault position deformations.

Figure 3—Some examples of perturbation zone.

Figure 4 —Example of grid deformation with horizontal and slanted well trajectories.

If deviated or horizontal well trajectories are assigned, the modifications have to be applied considering
the well completion data. An example of typical configurations are given in Figure 4 where the dotted red
line represents the trajectory of a horizontal well (on the left) and of a slanted well (on the right). The
deformation is distributed within the grid, but the cells penetrated by the well remain unmodified. The red
arrows point out the direction of the grid distortion as usual, while the black arrows are relative to the cells
where the perturbation is actually applied (the “perturbation zone”).
Also the fluid contacts and the closure consistency must be considered. The change of a top surface
corresponds to a change in the closure and a check on the oil or gas bearing layers must be carried out.
All the sealing faults, the active regions and the different fluid regions in the model should be considered
accordingly if more contacts are present.

Structural uncertainty parameterization

In order to apply the workflow suggested in Figure 1, a quantitative model of the structural uncertainty
must be provided. Moreover, this description must have a limited number of parameters that can be
handled within the HM (or RA) standard workflows.
As already seen in the previous section, the fault position or throw can be easily modified by means
of eni in-house tool and thus in this case the parameterization is straightforward. For instance, the lateral
uncertain displacement of a fault can be quantified by means of a minimum and maximum displacement
vector assuming, for example, a uniform distribution of magnitude between this two extremes (as shown
on the left in Figure 3).
SPE-170761-MS 5

When the uncertainty is related to the top (or

bottom) surface of the reservoir grid, according to
the available information, two different approaches
may be applied:
– An error map combined with a scaling factor;
– A set of alternative top, bottom or even in-
termediate surfaces representing the possible
shapes of the reservoir geometries.
Error map
In this case the error at each model node is the result Figure 5—Normalized 2D error map for a typical top reservoir surface
of a product between a 2D error map and a scaling uncertainty modeling.
factor. The error map specifies the shape while the
scaling factor defines the amount of vertical displacement; the error should be zero at well locations to
honour the known reservoir depth at those points.
An example of this map is given in Figure 5: the map values range from 0 (at the well locations,
meaning no error allowed) to 1 (maximum error far from the wells). It is worth remarking that the map
is expressed in non-dimensional terms, hence 1 stands for the maximum allowable error.
To obtain an actual (not normalized) perturbation surface the error map should be multiplied by the
scaling factor (expressed, for instance, in feet) and the obtained 2D perturbation can be applied to the
reference (most likely) 3D grid according to the elastic approach. At the end of this process, the structural
uncertainty is parameterized by means of a (fixed) error map and a multiplier (or weight) which is the
actual uncertainty to be quantified and then adopted in the workflow.
This approach may be too simplified, and it should be adopted when there are not enough information
for building an accurate spatial distribution of the error. However, it is able to explore the effect of a
potentially major shape change both on the original hydrocarbon in place and on dynamic behaviour of
the field.

Principal Component Analysis

More flexible structural variations can be introduced within the framework of elastic grid warping based
on 2D surfaces considering a geostatistical description of the uncertainty. According to this second case
a set of 2D map of possible top surface shapes are generated on the basis of detailed geophysical analysis
of the uncertainty.
Usually geostatistical simulation of velocities and depth conversion are used to produce a relatively
large set of alternatives (500 2D maps are a typical example). A visualization example of the results for
surface uncertainty modelling is given in Figure 6 where some alternative spatially correlated random
maps are represented. In principle the full set of realizations could be used for the uncertainty modelling
of the grid: each top surface could be used in a geomodelling software within a workflow for the definition
of a full reservoir model and the corresponding corner point grid geometry could be generated.
This very general approach may be cumbersome and cannot be adopted for large and complex models
or when the editing of surfaces and faults is mandatory. Moreover, the lack of an explicit parametric
description of structural uncertainty is hard to manage, both when analysing the results within risk analysis
applications and in the optimization loop required by history matching.
To overcome this issue, the use of Spatial Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is herein proposed. It
is a spatial frequency decomposition of the set of 2D maps (500 maps are a typical input) representing the
geophysical uncertainty of reservoir top/bottom or other intermediate surfaces (if geophysical vertical
resolution respect to reservoir thickness allows the identification of other internal layers). It both provides
6 SPE-170761-MS

Figure 6 —Example of six alternative (equiprobable) surfaces for the top reservoir map extracted from the set of all the geostatistical simulations.

Figure 7—Spatial PCA Workflow.

an efficient parameterization of the 2D maps and reduces the number of parameters, preserving as much
as possible the original spatial variability.
Within PCA, the error map is obtained as a weighted sum of relevant components (or eigenmaps)
obtained from the original set of geostatistical realizations according to the PCA workflow depicted in
Figure 7.
The result of the decomposition step is a set of 2D maps (eigenmaps, i.e. principal component maps)
and eigenvalues (variances of the eigenmaps). The principal component maps are sorted by decreasing
spatial features size (therefore increasing spatial frequency details).
The meaning of this decomposition can be explained observing that each simulated map is a weighted
sum of the principal components maps:

The eigenvalues found from the analysis are the variance of the set of weights wi,j, specific for each
simulation.
After the decomposition of the 500 maps in terms of principal component maps, the next step is the
selection of the most relevant ones, as only a very small number of components provides a substantial
contribution to the overall variance.
After the selection process, the original standard deviation map is compared with the map provided by
the selected n components, in order to check the correctness of the selection.
The overall structural uncertainty is eventually summarized into a reduced number of maps, each one
associated with its own weight.
Applications
History Matching Application
A simplified application of the workflow proposed in this paper was carried in a real oil field HM exercise.
SPE-170761-MS 7

Figure 8 —Reservoir model and well locations. Perturbation zone and effect of the fault displacement in the OP5 region.

The available data for matching purposes are oil and water rates and bottom hole pressure measure-
ments. The reservoir has a total of 3 producers and it is divided into two distinct productive units, and so
are well completions. The HM exercise was then handled as follows:
1. Simulating each well separately for each unit;
2. Imposing oil rate from each unit as control mode;
3. Matching bottom hole pressure and water cut at units 1 and 2.
A traditional HM has been carried out using as parameters the absolute permeability (global and region
multipliers) and local changes to well transmissibility.
The quality of the obtained match was generally fair, but for some wells, close to the main border fault
(Figure 8, left), the match of the pressure was not satisfactory, also considering very strong local changes.
The particular structure of the reservoir, i.e. the division into two productive units, the presence of a
main fault and the structural uncertainty highlighted during the development of the field (leading to
reviews of the reservoir geometry), made this field a good candidate for the application of the integrated
structural uncertainty HM workflow.
Unfortunately, a detailed geophysical quantitative input was not available, hence a simplified approach
based on error maps (as described in the previous section) was adopted. The only available quantitative
data were the mismatch at wells between the seismic prediction and the actual structure, thus a simple
quantitative model for the thickness uncertainty was built on the basis of these data.
Starting from error maps, the top and bottom of each unit were modified assuming that, far from wells,
the maximum possible displacement was in the same order of magnitude of the thickness of the main unit.
The structural parameterization is then finally made up of 8 multipliers of error maps: 2 maps by 2 units
by 2 surfaces (top and bottom) for each unit.
The uncertainty on the fault location was handled according to the uncertainty coming from seismic
interpretation, hence a potential horizontal translation of the fault, ranging in the interval of the thickness
of the main unit, was considered (a detail is shown in Figure 8, right).
To summarize, the match parameters adopted in the integrated structural HM are:
– the fault horizontal displacement;
– eight error maps multiplier, modelling the maximum displacement of the top/bottom of the two
units for each map;
Within the CAHM workflow, a satisfactory set of parameters was finally found and then, starting from
the updated structure, a further match improvement was performed looking for the best permeability and
connection factors multipliers.
In Figure 9 the main improvements of the structural HM are shown. These results mainly come from
slight changes to the thickness of the reservoir units and from the position of the main fault.
8 SPE-170761-MS

Figure 9 —Comparison between traditional (green line) and integrated structural (red line) HM.

It is worth underlining the significant improvement achieved on the well OP5, which was the most
challenging to match.
This application, even if somehow limited due to the scarcity of available quantitative characterization
of input uncertainty, was able to provide an integrated history match of the field, preserving the
information coming from the traditional match and improving the overall quality of it.
Risk Analysis Application
The methodology for structural uncertainty modelling was adopted, in this second case, integrating:
– the elastic gridding tool;
– the statistical parameters reduction technique (PCA);
– a standard Uncertainty Analysis and HM software
and leading to the realization of the structural uncertainty workflow suitable for Risk Analysis.
The main goal of this application was to show the structural uncertainty impact on oil in place and its
effect on the recoverable oil. On top of that, the proposed integrated workflow highlights the link between
the uncertainty on reserves and the structural features and provides indications about the high-risk
reservoir regions for oil production forecast.
As a starting point a set of geostatistical simulations (conditioned to existing well tops) of top reservoir
surfaces was built. These random generated maps (some of them are shown in Figure 6) were based both
on a geostatistical characterization of velocity used in depth conversion and on the mismatch between
seismic predicted depth and observed depth at wells for the reservoir top surface.
From the original 500 geostatistical realizations of top reservoir, 20 principal surfaces were selected to
represent the spatial variability according to the methodology previously discussed. As far as parameter-
ization is concerned, the uncertainty is given by the weights associated to each map (or multipliers, MLTR
in the following).
A sensitivity analysis (Figure 10) led to a further reduction of the impacting maps with the identifi-
cation of 7 fundamental shapes of error maps (Figure 11), among the 20 previously selected, used to
generate the structural perturbations of top reservoir surface.
It is worth remarking that two different steps of selection were applied in this exercise: the first one
comes from the PCA workflow, and only depends on spatial correlation and maps variance while the
second (sensitivity analysis) on the object of the risk evaluation (oil in place, oil production). This initial
selection comes from the risk analysis workflow, with the clear advantage of handling structural
uncertainties as if they were standard uncertainties.
These shapes have only relative values and metric perturbations are obtained by multiplying the maps
with factors (the weights) that are linked to the variance of the components. The error perturbation is
SPE-170761-MS 9

Figure 10 —Tornado plots from sensitivity analysis (selected multipliers above the red dashed line).

Figure 11—Most relevant components (eigenmaps) in terms of impact on oil in place.

Figure 12—Component 7 has a major impact on oil in place, because it affects a region close to oil-water contact.

finally obtained weighting each component by random generated multipliers and summing all the
weighted maps.
The most valuable aspect of the proposed workflow is the link between a structural feature and the
relative impact on reserves or production.
Looking for instance at Figure 12, it can be easily explained the impact of the component 7 both on
the oil in place and on the oil production. The shape of the component, indeed, acts on a reservoir zone
strongly affected by the uncertainty on the flank shape and close to the oil-water contact. This results in
relevant changes of the oil in place, as summarized in the two cross sections shown in Figure 12.
10 SPE-170761-MS

Table 2—Main statistics on oil in place from risk analysis evaluation.

Figure 13—Stepwise regression analysis of variance of FOPT at last time step: on the left the single variable case (“GRID”), on the right the spatial
PCA weights.

A complete static risk analysis evaluation was carried out, leading to the results summarized in Table
2 (expressed in terms of difference with the base case).
It is very interesting to show that the uncertainty on the flank, near the contact, entails an asymmetric
impact on the oil in place, as can be inferred by looking at the min/max or lower/higher percentiles.
As a final remark, it is interesting to observe that the analysis of variance (ANOVA) that can be carried
out with the stepwise regression approach is able to better clarify the dependency between structural
uncertainty and field oil production (at the last forecast time step).
Indeed, if a generic “grid index” variable is used to represent the structural uncertainty (as in standard
risk analysis workflow) the variability is then lumped in a single variable (“Grid uncertainty”). The same
analysis, if performed with weights, provides a more detailed explanation of the impact of the single
shapes (controlled by their own weights). The comparison is shown in in the pie charts in Figure 13, where
the dynamic relevance of each component is highlighted.
To sum up, the proposed approach is not only able to explain the overall impact of the structure, as in
a traditional risk analysis, but also distinguish the relevant contributions coming from the different
structural uncertainties.

Conclusions
The evaluation of structural uncertainty is always time-consuming involving hundreds of alternative
surfaces, the selection of some representative grids and in most cases a single fault network scenario.
On the other hand, the availability of integrated workflows in modelling software is currently limited.
In this paper an innovative methodology for structural uncertainty modelling according to an elastic
deformation applied to corner point grid has been presented.
The approach allows to easily interfacing with common modelling tools; it can be integrated with the
geophysical quantitative estimation of structural uncertainty and moreover directly coupled with standard
reservoir simulators.
According to this strategy, structural features such as reservoir depth, thickness, fault throw, inclination
and position can be modified on the basis of an uncertainty parameterization and several perturbed models
can be generated starting from a base case and used for uncertainty evaluation and history matching.
 SPE-170761-MS 11

The provided applications give evidence of the developed methodology flexibility and the additional
insight achievable with the direct link between a geologically-consistent structural uncertainty parame-
terization and reservoir simulations.

References
A. Seiler, S.I. Aanonsen, G. Evensen, O. Lia (2010). An elastic grid approach for fault uncertainty
modelling and updating using the Ensemble Kalman filter, SPE 130422, SPE EUROPEC/EAGE Annual
Conference and Exhibition, Barcelona, Spain, 14-17 June 2010.
A. Seiler, J.C. Rivenæs, S.I. Aanonsen and G. Evensen (2009). Structural Uncertainty Modelling and
Updating by Production Data Integration, SPE 125352, SPE/EAGE Reservoir Characterization and
Simulation Conference, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 19-21 October 2009.
R.G. Hanea, J.A. Skjervheim, G. Evensen and L. Hustoft (2013). Reservoir Modeling and Production
Forecast under Geological Uncertainties, EAGE/SPE Joint Workshop, Beyond Closed Loop Integrated
Monitoring, 17-20 November 2013, Lisbon, Portugal.

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