Fluid Flow Consistent Geostatistical History Matching of an Onshore Reservoir

Summary This paper shows the application to a real field case of an iterative geostatistical history matching technique, integrating geological and engineering consistency. Current trends reflect a growing interest on developing workflows that simultaneously integrate petrophysical modeling with dynamic calibration of reservoir models to historical production data. Contrary to manual history matching techniques, where model perturbation often disregards geological or physical realism leading to poor production forecast, this example introduces geological consistency through geostatistical simulation and physical realism by using streamline regionalization, while holding the predictive capability of resulting petrophysical models. This is achieved by iteratively updating the reservoir static properties using stochastic sequential simulation and co-simulation, constrained to production data, while using streamline information for electing preponderant flow production regions of the model, focusing property perturbation. In order to capture the complex subsurface heterogeneities of the reservoir, petrophysical property realizations are obtained using the direct sequential simulation and co-simulation with multi-local distribution functions. The location and proportion of reservoir facies is also automatically updated throughout the iterative procedure, using Bayesian Classification. The technique was successfully applied to a real case study, located in North-East onshore Brazil, resulting in multiple history matched models that better reproduce historic data.