Abstract Elements of reservoir management have been practiced for years, particularly if a major expenditure was planned for a field. However, the formalism of reservoir management as a process is a relatively recent concept in the petroleum industry. Wiggins and Startzman (1990) define reservoir management as “that set of operations and decisions by which a reservoir is identified, measured, produced, developed, monitored and evaluated from its discovery through depletion and final abandonment.”

Abstract The application of reservoir-geophysical technology is inherently multidisciplinary, and as discussed in Chapter 1, the concept of integrated asset teams has been transformational for reservoir management. As Pennington notes in his paper in Chapter 1 of this book, the teams are “united by common goals rather than common technologies.” However, reservoir management remains a fundamentally technical endeavor requiring the specialized knowledge of the team’s geologists, geophysicists, and engineers.

Abstract The use of geophysics for exploration appraisal began as a tool for reservoir definition, description of continuity, and estimation of thickness variations across the prospect. The primary application of seismic data was to define reservoir limits and compartments, and analysis techniques were limited to poststack data. That has been changing slowly but steadily in the past decade. For reservoir appraisal, seismic techniques have expanded to the prestack domain, contributing to the understanding of subtle reservoir variations, including lithology and fluid change. Electromagnetic methods are used to detect hydrocarbons directly at the reservoir scale.