Over Thirty Years of Petroleum Geostatistics

Abstract

If someone made a survey at the three major annual petroleum conferences, the AAPG for geologists, the SEG for geophysicists, and the SPE for reservoir engineers, and asked the participants if they knew who Georges Matheron was, the most likely answer would be no . Yet the words variograms, krigin multi-realizations, object models, etc., are ubiquitous in the technical sessions of these meetings. Geostatistical concepts and tools have become widespread in the industry that people tend to treat them as common knowledge, as if they had always been around. But at the origin of these ideas there is Georges Matheron, an exceptional man who had a profound impact on diffusion of probabilistic thinking in the Geosciences.