History matching is the process of updating a petroleum reservoir model using production data. It is a required step before a reservoir model is accepted for forecasting production. The process is normally carried out by flow simulation, which is very time-consuming. As a result, only a small number of simulation runs are conducted and the history matching results are normally unsatisfactory. I...

When direct measurement of model parameters is not possible, these need to be inferred indirectly from calibration data. To solve this inverse problem, an algorithm that preferentially samples all regions of the parameter space that fit data well is needed. In this paper, we apply a real-parameter Genetic Algorithm (GA) to sample the parameter space for the inverse problem of calibrating a petr...

The quest for efficient and scalable parallel reservoir simulators has been evolving with the advancement of high performance computing architectures. Among the various challenges of efficiency and scalability, load imbalance is a major obstacle that has not been fully addressed and solved. The reasons that cause load imbalance in parallel reservoir simulation are both static and dynamic. Robus...

Panax Geothermal Limited is developing a geothermal resource in South Australia, the Limestone Coast Project, which is a conventional “hot aquifer” reservoir in a deep sedimentary basin. The initial development is the Pretty Hill Formation sandstones in the Penola Trough of the Otway Basin. The area is an exploited gas basin with modern 3D seismic and excellent existing petroleum well data cove...

Permeability is the key parameter of the reservoir and has a significant impact on petroleum fields operations and reservoir management. In most reservoirs, permeability measurements are rare and therefore permeability must be measured in the laboratory from reservoir core samples or evaluated from well test data. However, core analysis and well test data are usually only available from a few w...

Reservoir simulation is ubiquitous in the petroleum industry, and conditioning models to production data (history matching) has become an essential job of reservoir engineers. Traditional history matching methods directly perturb reservoir properties without regard to the existing geological continuity. When the geological heterogeneity is destroyed, the result is often a history-matched model ...