Using predictive analytics to unlock unconventional plays

Julie Vonnet and Gudmund Hermansen introduce a multi-disciplinary, integrated reservoir modelling workflow that gathers data of different natures, sources and scale in order to predict sweet spots locations. The dramatic expansion in computing power over the past two decades and the huge amount of data generated within organisations have led to a proliferation of new methods to identify patterns and trends among these large datasets. Data mining and predictive analytics are cross-disciplinary approaches that consist of advanced mathematical and statistical methods that retrace patterns from petabytes of data. Such methods and algorithms are able to extract information, correlations and interplays and turn them into structured sets of interactions for predicting the behaviour of a system – even under unknown conditions.