Proceedings of the
Second International Energy 2030 Conference,
November 4-5, 2008, Abu Dhabi, U.A.E.
Manual versus Software Assisted History Matching Advantages and Limitations
Shawket G. Ghedan
The Petroleum Institute, UAE
Adrian Gibson
Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Oil Operations (ADCO), UAE
Ilhan Sener
Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Oil Operations (ADCO), UAE
Ralf Schulze-Riegert
Scandpower Petroleum Technology, Germany
Ozgur Gunal
The Petroleum Institute, UAE
Alex Diab
Scandpower Petroleum Technology, Germany
Abstract
History matching is defined as the process of reconciling geologic models to the dynamic response of
the reservoir. The main purpose of history matching is building a numerical simulation model which is
consistent with the entire available reservoir data, i.e. geological, petrophysical and Special Core Analysis
(SCAL) data as well as production data including field and well pressure, flow rates, water cuts and gas oil
ratios.
Some known giant petroleum fields in the world are carbonate reservoirs characterized by a high level
of heterogeneity. This level of heterogeneity necessitates the understanding of reservoir uncertainties in all
levels of the reservoir modeling process including: data acquisition, geological static modeling and
dynamic simulation modeling. Manual history matching of the simulation of these kinds of reservoirs
often fails to cover important reservoir uncertainties. Geological models derived from static data, such as
geological, well log, core and seismic data, often fail to reproduce the reservoir production history [1].
In order to obtain an acceptable description of the reservoir by history matching, many different
simulation runs in completely different regions of the search space must be performed [2]. In order to
capture reservoir model uncertainties within the range of model parameter uncertainties, a variety of
models should be generated. They will not be distinguishable with respect to the reproduction of history
data but may deliver different predictions of future reservoir performance [3]. The manual history
matching process often tunes a limited set of parameters to reach to only one acceptable non-unique
history matched model. In addition to this serious limitation, manual history matching is time consuming,
and faces a real challenge in terms of keeping track of the model response to parameter changes and their
