Exploration: A Systematic Approach to Risk Management

Exploration is risky. Successful exploration involves understanding those risks—ranking plays and prospects, managing your drillable inventory, and improving your success ratio.

Exploration success also depends on understanding and quantifying the key geological risk elements—trap, reservoir, charge, and seal. These elements are connected and affect one another; their relative timing will determine whether commercial hydrocarbons can be found and extracted.

These risk elements are best evaluated together using a systems approach, unifying all the appropriate exploration data into a single, easy-to-use environment centered around Petrel software.

The Schlumberger Software Exploration System frees explorationists to test all their creative ideas. It preserves knowledge from play to production and supports thorough, model-based evaluations of exploration risk elements—trap, reservoir, charge, and seal.

The Play-to-Prospect Risk plug-in takes geological elements—trap, reservoir, charge and seal—and converts them into chance maps through a suite of transform methods. Scenarios are compared to determine play limits and identify areas for high grading to support rapid ranking of opportunities. This enables refinement of geological scenarios combined with chance of success—to deliver probabilistic hydrocarbon volumes.

Beyond that, Schlumberger has created the industry’s most powerful framework for innovation—the Ocean software development framework for Petrel. The Ocean environment enables you to extend Petrel workflows to solve your unique exploration challenges.

The Schlumberger Exploration System

• Workflows centred around Petrel to evaluate prospect uncertainty
• Consistently evaluate key risk elements from play to prospect integrating petroleum-system-based assessment 
• Basin-to-prospect scalability 
• Knowledge preservation from exploration to production

Trap

• Structural framework functionality within Petrel software
• Interpretation and modeling of stratigraphic bodies
• Easy evaluation of uncertainty in the structural definition and the relationship with other parameters, such as the velocity model, using the Petrel workflow manager

Reservoir

• Advanced attributes for fault and fracture characterization
• Integration of regional geology – play maps, satellite images, offset wells
• Unified workflow for standard exploration tasks – depth conversion, volumetrics, mapping
• Techlog for multiwell petrophysics - integration of logs, fluids, core & geology

Charge

• Evaluation of maturation and migration of hydrocarbons with the Petroleum Systems Quick Look plug-in for Petrel
• Charge modeling that includes source and timing of hydrocarbon generation, migration routes, quantities, and hydrocarbon type with PetroMod petroleum systems modeling software

Seal

• Fault-seal analysis using Petrel’s Structural and Fault Analysis module, developed by RDR
• Geomechanical process modeling
• Structural reconstruction using Igeoss applications within the Schlumberger software environment

Extensibility with Ocean software development framework

• Open development of software plug-ins
• Plug-ins to address a variety of challenges specific to risk and reservoir types
• Best-of-breed and specialist applications from within the Petrel environment
• Easy to deploy via the Ocean Store

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