Combining Numerical Modeling with Geostatistical Interpolation for an Improved Reservoir Exploration

Subsurface temperature is one of the key parameters in geothermal exploration. The estimation of the reservoir temperature is of high importance and usually done either by interpolation of temperature data or numerical modeling. However, temperature measurements of depths larger than a few hundred meters are generally very sparse. A pure interpolation of such sparse data always involves big uncertainties and usually neglects knowledge of the reservoir geometry or reservoir properties.Kriging with trend does allow including secondary data to improve the interpolation of the primary one. Using this approach temperature measurements of depths larger than 1,000 m of the federal state of Hessen/Germany have been interpolated in 3D. A conductive numerical 3D temperature model was used as secondary information. This way the interpolation result reflects also the geological structure. As a result the quality of the estimation improves considerably.