In today’s energy landscape, sustainability is often framed around emissions, efficiency, and responsible operations. But beneath all these objectives lies a dependency that is too often overlooked: accuracy.
Accurate models, data, forecasts, and decisions form the backbone of sustainable reservoir management.
When accuracy erodes, sustainability erodes with it.
This is where technology choice matters, because accuracy is not a philosophical concept. It is the practical outcome of rigorous physics, high-fidelity simulation, and uncompromising technical standards. Ultimately, it is accuracy and not chance that determines whether an operator extracts resources responsibly or inadvertently increases waste, emissions, and long-term environmental impact.
Sustainability Begins With Predicting Reality, Not Approximating It
Many sustainability challenges in reservoir management originate from one problem: decisions based on models that do not fully represent the subsurface.
When forecasts are directionally correct but technically incomplete, operations tend to overshoot: more wells drilled than needed, more energy injected, more fluid handled, more emissions released.
Sustainability deteriorates quietly, decision by decision.
“In my years in the industry, I have witnessed many cases where a proper uncertainty analysis could have saved millions of dollars and avoided reactive, environmentally costly solutions. For example, several operators significantly underestimated the water potential of their fields and installed surface-handling facilities with limited water capacity. As water encroachment increased, these facilities became overwhelmed, forcing wells to be shut in, resulting in millions of dollars in daily production losses and further reductions in recovery factor due to additional water movement after shut-in. All of this could have been prevented through accurate forecasts and uncertainty evaluation.
I have also seen cases where operators optimized their field development plans by balancing fracture half-length, fracture density, and well spacing to maximize NPV. While this approach provided an initial uplift, the long-term view was overlooked. Even though CO₂-EOR had been identified early as a likely future requirement to improve recovery, many teams assumed that the same well configuration optimized for primary production would remain optimal for CO₂ injection. When the EOR phase finally arrived, reality proved otherwise. The well spacing and fracture geometry required for efficient CO₂ sweep were fundamentally different from those selected for initial production.
As a result, the overall recovery factor was significantly impacted and by the time the mismatch became evident, the wells were already drilled, leaving little room to correct the development strategy. This is a prime example of how incomplete forecasts and the absence of uncertainty-driven planning can lock assets into decades of suboptimal, less sustainable performance.”
– Carlos Granado, Regional Director USA, CMG
Physics-based simulation prevents this drift by ensuring that subsurface behavior is predicted as it will happen, not as a simplified approximation. Accurate representation of pressure, saturation, phase behavior, thermal effects, enhanced recovery processes, geomechanics, fracture propagation (including parent–child interactions), and uncertainty allows teams to:
- Avoid unnecessary drilling and surface infrastructure
- Optimize injection volumes and energy use
- Improve sweep efficiency and reduce water production
- Design fracture programs that minimize pumping energy and water use
- Extend asset life while lowering environmental footprint
Sustainability is not an output metric; it is an outcome of consistently making accurate technical decisions.
Inaccurate Models Increase Emissions, Waste, and Energy Consumption
Every inaccurate forecast has an environmental cost. Examples include:
- A mispredicted waterflood front leads to excessive pumping, water handling, and emissions
- Underestimating thermal requirements in heavy oil operations increases fuel use and carbon intensity
- Incorrect pressure forecasts lead to inefficient artificial lift consumption
- Poorly characterized heterogeneity forces additional wells or rework
- Misrepresenting fracture interference between parent and child wells leads to overstimulation, wasted horsepower, and more wells than truly needed
- Undersized water-handling facilities cause shut-ins and lower recovery rate
Sustainability is, therefore, not limited by operator intentions, but by operator precision.
Simulation technologies, those built on strong physics, robust numerical solvers, and consistent workflows, significantly reduce the error margin that often translates into environmental and operational inefficiencies.
AI Without Accuracy Is an Accelerator of Unsustainable Decisions
AI is transforming reservoir engineering, but the industry is learning an important lesson: AI is only as sustainable as the physics and data it is grounded in.
If AI models are trained on incomplete, biased, or low-resolution data, they may produce results that appear convincing but deviate from physical reality.
AI should reinforce physics, not replace it.
When AI is tethered to rigorous subsurface modeling, accuracy improves rather than deteriorates, ensuring digital technologies deliver correctness, not just speed.
Accurate Technology Enables a More Sustainable Future
The industry is under pressure to deliver both performance and responsibility. But the two are not competing goals, they are aligned through accuracy. The more precisely reservoir behavior is understood, the more efficient surface operations can be planned, energy allocated, and resources managed. In other words, accurate models reduce emissions before operations even begin.
High-accuracy modeling directly influences environmental performance:
- High-fidelity multiphase simulation reduces uncertainty and prevents unnecessary operations
- Advanced thermal and compositional modeling ensures optimized energy use
- Coupled geomechanics enables realistic evaluation of caprock stability and potential fault reactivation, supporting safe, permanent storage strategies
- Advanced fracture modeling captures parent–child interactions, reducing overstimulation and improving well spacing decisions
- CCS modeling predicts CO₂ plume evolution, caprock integrity, and regulatory AoR (Area of Review) that is critical for long-term storage security
- Integrated production system modeling (IPSM) ensures accurate facility design, avoiding oversized equipment and reducing ongoing energy consumption
- Geochemical modeling predicts reactions in CCS, SWI, and Geothermal systems, ensuring stable injectivity and extending asset life
- Uncertainty and optimization workflows guide decisions that maximize recovery with minimum wasted input
Sustainability Is Achieved Through Technical Precision
As the industry moves toward lower-carbon operations, stricter regulations, and rising public expectations, sustainability will increasingly depend on decisions rooted in:
- Robust Physics
- Validated Data
- Integrated workflows
- High-Accuracy Simulation
- Robust Uncertainty Management
Operators who invest in these capabilities consistently outperform, not only in recovery or economics but in environmental integrity.
The path to sustainable reservoir management is not paved with slogans or superficial digitalization. It is built on the engineering discipline of getting the subsurface right and increasingly, the surface as well.
And accuracy, supported by rigorous, physics-based technologies, remains the foundation that makes sustainability measurable, repeatable, and achievable.
Conclusion
Sustainable reservoir management is ultimately determined by the quality of the technical decisions made under uncertainty. Accuracy reduces that uncertainty, preventing inefficiencies, excess energy use, and environmental impact from being locked into assets over their life cycle. As digital tools and AI become more prevalent, their value will be defined not by speed or automation, but by how faithfully they represent physical reality. Sustainability, therefore, is not an abstract ambition – it is the direct outcome of disciplined, physics-based accuracy applied consistently.
For decades, CMG’s physics-based simulation expertise has been built around this principle, enabling operators to make technically sound decisions that support long-term performance and responsible resource development.
