Advances Reservoir Simulation Using Soft Computing

Reservoir simulation is a challenging problem for the oil and gas industry. A correctly calibrated reservoir simulator provides an effective tool for reservoir evaluation that can be used to obtain essential reservoir information. A long-standing problem in reservoir simulation is history matching, which is to find a suitable set of values for the simulator's input parameters such that the simulator correctly predicts the fluid (oil, gas, water, etc.) outputs of the wells on the reservoir, over the time period of interest. Due to the sheer size of the problem, completely satisfactory results of history matching have been difficult and expensive to achieve. This paper presents a novel technique of using fuzzy control to solve history matching. Intended for implementation on a cluster of PCs, our technique aims not only to solve history matching faster, but also solves it at a lower cost. Preliminary results and ongoing work are described.