Explorative Toolbox for Geostatistics Modelling Education

This project is run by F. Fragiacomo, under the supervision of C. Kehl and in collaboration with J. Miocic. It is a collaboration project with the Geo-Energy group (at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen).

Porous media reservoirs are essential for the energy supply – nowadays, by providing oil & natural gas for combustion processes, as well as in the future, by means of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and as source of geothermal energy. Finding those reservoirs and assessing their energy-delivery potential is at the core of petroleum geology. Assessing those porous media reservoirs is nowadays rarely conducted by environmentally-intrusive drilling. Instead, geologists use geostatistical tools to model a reservoir. Those tools integrate sparse-sample interpolation using statistical prior knowledge, such as porosity distribution or homogeneity of the rock composition. The different geostatistical algorithms together represent the toolbox of the geological modeller.

For geology students, learning about the various algorithms, their differences, (dis-)advantages and application scenarios is complicated. The algorithms are integrated in professional, complex and commercial tools, which themselves are not designed for method learning but for production modelling. This lack of learning tools poses a barrier in geology education.

This project aims to remove this entry barrier by providing for a simplistic, graphical and interactive tool to try out various modelling techniques on educational case studies and without the need for production data.