The work processes related to integrating this information in simulation models, i.e. models used for prediction of dynamic reservoir behaviour, are traditionally known as "history matching".

The challenge is to incorporate the information in dynamic data in all reservoir modelling, and to consistently span the uncertainty in predictions.

Statoil has for several years been active in this field of research, with the goal of developing tools that may assist the reservoir engineers in the search for reservoir models that match the observed dynamic data.

We are doing research on several methods, including response surface based methods and EnKF (ensemble Kalman filter) methods for history matching.

Another important source of dynamic information about the reservoir is time-lapse (4D) seismic data.

Reservoir engineers, geophysicists and geoscientists in Statoil are working together on this problem, known as seismic history matching.