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Chapter from:
AAPG Memoir 71: Reservoir Characterization-Recent Advances
Edited by Richard A. Schatzinger and John F. Jordan
Copyright 1999 by The American Association of Petroleum Geologists. All rights reserved.
Memoir 71, Chapter 10: Reducing Uncertainty in Geostatistical Description with Well-Testing Pressure Data , by Albert C. Reynolds, Nanqun He, and Dean S. Oliver , Pages 149 - 162

Chapter 10
Reducing Uncertainty in Geostatistical Description with Well-Testing Pressure Data

Dean S. Oliver
Department of Petroleum Engineering, University of Tulsa
Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.A.

Geostatistics has proven to be an effective tool for generating realizations of reservoir properties conditioned to static data (for example, core and log data, and geologic knowledge); however, in situations when data are not closely spaced in the lateral directions, there will be significant variability in reservoir descriptions generated by geostatistical simulation (that is, significant uncertainty in the reservoir descriptions). Procedures based on inverse problem theory were previously presented for generating reservoir descriptions (rock property fields) conditioned to pressure data and to geostatistical information represented by prior means and variograms for log-permeability and porosity. Although it has been shown that incorporation of pressure data reduces the uncertainty below the level contained in the geostatistical model based only on static information (the prior model), these previous results did not explicitly account for uncertainties in the prior means and the parameters defining the variogram.