Abstract—Material balance analysis is an interpretation method used to determine the original oil and gas in place and to predict petroleum reservoir performance based on production and static pressure data analysis, also to evaluate the remaining reserves by applying the principle of material balance to rate-time decline analysis. Material balance techniques are widely used throughout all phase of reservoir development, providing a dynamic measure of hydrocarbon volumes and an estimate of key reservoir parameters. The purpose of this study was the quantification of the uncertainties in the estimation of original hydrocarbon in place. An extensive sensitivity analysis was conducted to provide an insight into the features that must be accurately determined in order to obtain the value of the OGIP. Common tools that are frequently used in the petroleum industry such as Material Balance and Monte Carlo were used in combination to support investment decisions for field development. To deal with this challenge, an automated concept has been developed using Petroleum Experts MBAL^TM software. The results showed that the estimation of OGIP by material balance calculations was very sensitive to the pressure and aquifer models data uncertainties. Therefore, the error in pressure data identified as the most significant source of the uncertainty in material balance estimations. Errors in Porosity distribution and net pay thickness are the main source of uncertainty in the properties of reservoir characteristics. Permeability was the important sources of uncertainty but not significant. Finally, encroachment angel and compressibility were the parameter with less uncertainty on material balance calculations. Therefore, the significant of this study is to investigate the effect of reservoir data uncertainties on material balance calculation.

Index Terms—reservoir properties, data uncertainties, material balance calculation, OGIP estimation, tank model, simulation by MBAL, history matching, transmissibility

Cite: Hazim N. Dmour, Mohammed S. Bageri, and Mostafa M. Kinawy, "Investigating the Effect of Input Data Uncertainties in Material Balance Calculations for Hydrocarbon Reservoirs," Journal of Industrial and Intelligent Information, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 289-296, December 2014. doi: 10.12720/jiii.2.4.289-296