Probablistic Engineering

The evolution of the  practice of probablistic engineering by reservoir engineers has been briefly covered under Uncertainty Management.

It is the intention of this website to provide a comprehensive knowledge base of all the mainstream strands of the Practice of Reservoir Engineering.  The IQ of the website founder is probably sufficient to enable an understanding of the recent development of probablistic simulation practice in the form of Assisted History Matching, Mulitiple Scenario and Performance optimisation. However, experience  underpining that IQ in this area is lacking and the ability to 'see the wood from the trees' has yet to be developed. A cursory review of SPE literature abstracts on the subject reveals that numerous articles exsist and  a myriad of mathematical methods have been applied in probalistic simulation. A 'State of the Nation' paper has yet to be sourced.

On the basis of Albert Einstein's quote;

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

the Founder is keen to say as little on this topic as possible. However, the cursory literature review did reveal that;

• The Founder's concern that Drillers maybe challenged by the concept of drilling a 'Probablistic Well Location' is addressed  in the SPE Paper 112257. Apparently Gradient Based Algorithms and Adjoint Methods are able to address what is termed a 'Discrete Parameter Problem'.

• The Founder's concern that the uncertainty associated with production data is being overlooked maybe a valid one. The SPE Paper 124271 provides an example of the magnitude to which production data can be uncertain.

• The SPE Paper 122826 entitled

History Matching: Is it Necessary to Optimise?

Concludes

If companies actually need more than one model to make their decisions, the answer for the question asked in the title is; optmisation is not necessary

• In the paper SPE 109610 entitled

Decision Making in the oil and Gas Industry: From Blissful Ignorance to Uncertainty Induced Confusion

it is stated in the abstract that;

The battle against deterministic forecasts and financial valuations in the oil and gas industry appears to have been won, as evidenced by the plethora of papers, conference sessions and forums focussed on uncertainty quantification or profit prediction. Yet decision makers are still not sure what they  should do. Rather than basing important decisions on a single number, they now find themselves buried under a mountan of probability distributions . Uncertainty quantification seems to have confused more than it has enlightened.