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Abstract

Ma, Y. Zee, Andrew Seto, and Ernest Gomez, 2011, Coupling Spatial and Frequency Uncertainty Analyses in Reservoir Modeling: Example of Judy Creek Reef Complex in Swan Hills, Alberta, Canada, in Y. Z. Ma and P. R. La Pointe, eds., Uncertainty analysis and reservoir modeling: AAPG Memoir 96, p. 159173.

DOI:10.1306/13301413M963458

Copyright copy2011 by The American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

Coupling Spatial and Frequency Uncertainty Analyses in Reservoir Modeling: Example of Judy Creek Reef Complex in Swan Hills, Alberta, Canada

Y. Zee Ma,1 Andrew Seto,2 Ernest Gomez3

1Schlumberger, Greenwood Village, Colorado, U.S.A.
2Pengrowth Corporation, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
3Schlumberger, Greenwood Village, Colorado, U.S.A.; present address: Penn West Energy, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Pengrowth Corporation for permission to use the data, Schlumberger Ltd. for permission to publish this work, Jim Urdea for reading the draft, and the reviewers for their useful suggestions.

ABSTRACT

Judy Creek is a large carbonate reservoir in the giant Swan Hills oil field, located in Alberta, Canada. After nearly 50 yr of production, an updated reservoir model was required for planning further development. In this chapter, we discuss reservoir modeling and uncertainty evaluation of Judy Creek.

A critical basis for field development planning is the estimate of hydrocarbon pore volume initially in place, wherein porosity is a key parameter. How a three-dimensional porosity model is populated using well-log data can have a significant impact on the volumetric estimate. We developed a workflow to accurately model subsurface pore space and volumetric uncertainty. The new model built using this workflow honors the depositional characteristics of the reef complex and, thus, more realistically represents subsurface heterogeneities. Previous models underestimated the pore space because of an inference bias from the well-log data to the three-dimensional model. The new model honors the frequency statistics from the well-log data and, thus, improves the estimation of the pore volume. This study included geologic and petrophysical uncertainty analyses to evaluate volumetric uncertainty, resulting in the new model that has more pore volume than the previous models, which has implications for the field development planning of the Judy Creek reservoir.

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