From a summary of the state-of-the-art and current trends within reservoir characterization practice and research, this paper suggests and discusses new avenues and focal points for the future. Despite today's high activity level and the many recent apparent advances within reservoir characterization practice and technology, the province-average recovery factors have not increased significantly, production forecasts are still notoriously in error, and the mainstream day-to-day geoscience/reservoir engineering approach to modeling, mapping, gridding, visualizing, and forecasting the behavior of reservoirs in a typical oil company has not changed noticeably during the last five years. Even if the large and easy reservoirs have been found and developed in many basins, evidence suggests that researchers are not outsmarting nature to give up more of its oil now than she did before. Even recently predicted production profiles turn out to be surprisingly erroneous. So, what can be done What are the major challenges in reservoir characterization research Which are the areas with the greatest potential payoff Suggestions for future research activities are scattered throughout this paper, but it is believed than in order to outsmart nature, you have to know her. Hence, detailed reservoir tomography by some known (e.g. seismic) or as-yet undiscovered technology, whichmore » yields images of all faults, the correct structure map, and geological architectural flow-unit and barrier details down to 1-m resolution is on top of the reservoir characterization research wish list.« less
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