Energy Exploration & Exploitation

The work presented here uses a basin analysis code, developed for Excel, to handle burial history, fluid flow, fracturing, overpressure development with time, erosion events, kerogen breakdown to oil and gas, hydrocarbon volumetrics for both oil and gas including source retention, migration loss, and area changes with time of source rocks for each formation. The code is remarkably fast, requiring about 0.2 seconds on a laptop to perform all the above calculations for ten formations as well as producing pictorial representations of all variables with space and time. The code seamlessly interfaces with the Monte Carlo risking program Crystal Ball so that a total uncertainty analysis can be done with as many uncertain inputs as required and as many outputs of interest as needed without increasing the computer time needed. A thousand Crystal Ball runs take only about 200 seconds, allowing one to investigate many possible scenarios extremely quickly.

We show here with four basic examples how one goes about identifying which parameters in the input (ranging from uncertain data, uncertain thermal history, uncertain permeability, uncertain fracture coefficients for rocks, uncertain geochemistry kinetics, uncertain kerogen amounts and types per formation, through to uncertain volumetric factors) are causing the greatest contributions to uncertainty in any and all outputs. The relative importance, relative contributions and relative sensitivity are examined to show when it is necessary to know more about the underlying distributions of uncertain parameters, when it is necessary to know more about the dynamic range of a parameter to narrow its contribution to the total uncertainty, and which parameters are necessary to first focus on to narrow their uncertainty in order to improve the dynamical, thermal or hydrocarbon outputs.

An interface of such a coupled pair of very fast Excel codes with an Excel economics package can also now easily be undertaken so that one ties scientific uncertainty and economic uncertainty together for hydrocarbon exploration and identifies the global parameters dominantly influencing the combined economic/basin analysis system.