Direct spatiotemporal interpolation of reservoir flow responses

The traditional reservoir modeling workflow consists of first developing a reservoir model, performing flow simulation on that model, validating the model by performing history matching and finally using the history matched model to make predictions of future performance. In contrast, this paper presents two approaches to directly analyze the spatio-temporal variations of dynamic responses such as pressure and well flowrates and perform interpolation. Both these techniques are anchored to the data at the wells. Therefore, the resultant spatio-temporal predictions of dynamic response are history matched by construction. The proposed approach can be used to quickly determine optimal location to drill additional wells and to gauge the influence of reservoir management decisions.