Value of multiple production measurements and water front tracking in closed-loop reservoir management

Abstract

This paper extends previous work on value of information (VOI) assessment in closed-loop reservoir management (CLRM) to estimate the added value of performing multiple measurements along the producing life of the reservoir. The new procedure is based on the workflow from our previous paper which allows to quantify the VOI of a single observation under geological uncertainty. Here we show that, by modifying that workflow slightly, it is possible to assess the value of a series of measurements without a prohibitive increase in computational costs. The approach is illustrated with two cases based on a simple water flooding problem in a two-dimensional five-spot reservoir: the first one, in which we assess the value of a series of production measurements, and the second one, in which we estimate the additional value of water front positions tracked by an interpreted time-lapse seismic survey. We believe that our proposed workflow is a complete methodology to estimate the VOI in a CLRM context because we take into account that the production strategy is updated periodically after new information has been assimilated in the models. However, future work will be required to reduce the computational load to allow for the application of the workflow to real field cases.