Geological Modeling and Reservoir Description for Heterogeneous Shuaiba-Khabaz Reservoir in Northern Iraq

Building a reliable and accurate geological model for a carbonate reservoir poses extreme challenges in reservoir modeling studies that lead to higher uncertainty levels for field development plans. Consequently, economic viability studies for the field will suffer from low confidence levels. The improper geological interpretation for reservoir heterogeneity may lead to project failure. This study presents an integrated geological model building, evaluation, and demonstrating results of the Shuaiba reservoir in the Khabaz field by highlighting a practical approach. The geological analysis included an evaluation of the structure, determination, and consideration of the deposition environment. A robust facies model was generated to capture the lateral and vertical reservoir heterogeneity. This leads to accurate reservoir characterization of reservoir heterogeneity by establishing a reservoir model conditioning to well observations which is called explicitly modeling of known heterogeneities. The mathematical and statistical algorithms are used to systematically simulate the spatial distribution of reservoir properties at inter-well locations.