Decision-Making Process in Development of Offshore Petroleum Fields

Abstract

Abstract Risk is inherent to all phases of a petroleum field lifetime due to geological, economic and technological uncertainties, which are very significant on oil recovery in development phase, the focus of this work. The acquisition of additional information of uncertain attributes and flexibility during the development are key points to risk mitigation. The Value of Information (VoI) is used to quantify the benefits of new information, giving more accuracy to the project. The Value of Flexibility (VoF) measures the benefits of adding flexibility to the project considering different possible scenarios. A new and reliable methodology has been proposed to quantify VoI and VoF based on the decision tree technique in order to combine the uncertain attributes. All reservoir models generated by the tree are submitted to parallel simulation and Geological Representative Models (GRM) are selected to represent geological uncertainties. The methodology includes the criteria used for selection of GRM, optimization of production strategies of each GRM considering the gathering of additional information and statistical treatment of the results. The methodology has been applied in a decision-making process of a giant offshore petroleum field. The field has been developed by blocks due to its physical limitations and intrinsic characteristics and the high investment necessary to develop a giant field. The contributions of this work are (1) to show the importance of VoI and VoF concepts in decision-making process in petroleum field development and the complexity of this type of decision, (2) to apply the proposed methodology in a giant offshore field modeled by parts, minimizing risks associated to the development of this type of field and (3) to evaluate the importance of the reservoir uncertainties in risk mitigation. An additional important contribution is to present the details of the use of reservoir simulation in the process, trying to obtain the best relationship between computation effort and reliability of the decision making process.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.