Value of Information Analysis for Time-lapse Seismic Data in Reservoir Development

Time-lapse seismic data is often acquired to aid in making reservoir development decisions like well placement decisions or well control decisions, but does the data generate enough additional revenue to justify its cost? This question can be answered by evaluating the decision-analytic metric of value of information (VOI) for time-lapse seismic data in the context of making reservoir development decisions. A framework to evaluate the VOI for spatial problems in the earth sciences is presented, and a computationally efficient workflow is proposed to evaluate the VOI using the framework. This workflow is validated by comparing the results with those from a rigorous Monte Carlo workflow. Various applications of the workflow to VOI analysis in realistic cases are presented.

Speaker: Geetartha Dutta, PhD candidate, Stanford