Estimation of prospective locations in mature hydrocarbon producing areas

摘要

Kalman filtering is a methodology that has demonstrated great potential for solving a large number of problems in many areas. It has so far had its greatest success in the areas of control theory and process control, but is a method and it is not limited to this area. There are a great number of areas within oil and gas exploration where it can prove to be of great success. Of particular interest is an aid to exploration in mature hydrocarbon provinces. The identification of remaining reserves of hydrocarbons in stratigraphic traps in the world's mature hydrocarbon provinces is a difficult task. Often these traps are small compounding identification. A subset of this general problem is the appropriate location of new wells in known producing areas. The task reported on herein has been to complete an uncompleted pattern of successful and unsuccessful wells. Two dimensional Kalman filter and interpolation theory is used to estimate successful and unsuccessful well locations. Based on a map of the known well locations, the image representing the estimated pattern is completed. The majority of image pixels in this particular case will be unknown, and not just distorted off of its original value by noise. Examples are detailed and discussed.