Geological Uncertainty Quantification: A Futile Attempt in the Absence of a Decision Context

In most extractive industries, understanding geological uncertainty is key to making good decisions. In addition, the decisions should serve our goal of extracting economical amounts of resources. With this description, building the most realistic geological model should not be the goal. Instead, our goal should be to build models that support good extraction decisions. Yet, we rarely discuss the link between uncertainty models and their usefulness. We devote substantial efforts to gathering information and building sophisticated subsurface models but significantly less to exploring their economics and usefulness. If, for example, we make the same petroleum drilling decision irrespective of the granularity of the uncertainty model, then the time and effort spent on developing such sophisticated models have been in vain.