Undiscovered hydrocarbon resources of well-studied territories and complexes of the West Siberian oil and gas province
L.M. Burshteina, V.R. Livshitsa, A.N. Kozyreva, A.N. Sedykha
Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia
Keywords: undiscovered resources, remaining resources, hydrocarbons, West Siberian petroleum province, Jurassic and Cretaceous complexes, size distribution of accumulations, truncated Pareto distribution, Monte-Carlo simulation, stochasticity of hydrocarbon deposit formation
Abstract
The study presents a probabilistic approach to assessing undiscovered hydrocarbon resources in well explored areas of the West Siberian petroleum province. The relevance of this work arises from the mature exploration stage of the region, where further resource growth is expected mainly from small and very small accumulations. The methodology is based on analyzing the size distribution of hydrocarbon accumulations using a truncated Pareto distribution, whose parameters are estimated through maximum likelihood applied to the largest discovered fields. Probabilistic characteristics of initial and remaining resources are obtained via Monte Carlo simulations, which account for variations in the total number of accumulations and their aggregate volumes. The Jurassic and Cretaceous complexes of the continental part of the province, characterized by high geological knowledge and a representative dataset of discovered fields, serve as the study area. The results obtained confirm the applicability of the probabilistic approach for assessing undiscovered resources in mature oil and gas provinces and allow for the evaluation of their degree of uncertainty.
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