The “ground floor” of any reservoir model is its static geological model. Make sure it’s a sturdy, accurate foundation to build upon.
You’re ready to develop, extract and produce an efficient and economic oil and gas well. Or you’re looking to improve recovery in a developed field as part of your ongoing reservoir management plan. In either case, it’s time to construct your reservoir model for running a simulation, which will consist of:
- A static model that incorporates the geological interpretation of the reservoir;
- A dynamic flow model that describes how fluids flow within the reservoir;
- A network model that designs and calculates the surface network — the well, sources, links, pipes, joints, pumps, chokes, compressors, separators and sinks, along with a graphical user interface (GUI) and tools to analyze results.
To build your reservoir simulation model, your team of geophysicists, geologists and engineers need to work together to input the data needed to build a coherent model.
Work together? Impossible, right? Each earth science discipline has its own pet software programs and preferred way of doing things. Worse, the sciences of engineering, geology and geophysics each has its own way of interpreting “accurate.”
Building your static geology model from scratch
Frequently, E&P companies feel compelled to use a software program coded more than two decades ago in Norway to build their static geology model. You know the name of it. It’s very expensive and it’s a bit long in the tooth, but since it is now owned lock-stock-and-barrel by the world’s largest and biggest-name in oilfield services, the software has an undeserved aura of credibility. But it’s no longer the only game in town.
There’s another and better way to build your static model, and it was programmed in the 21st century in tandem with — and integrated into — all the other reservoir modeling software modules you’ll need to run thorough and complete simulations. It’s called Geology Designer, and it’s part of tNavigator® from Rock Flow Dynamics.
With tNavigator you don’t have to cobble together different software modules built by different companies in different decades to build a reliable reservoir simulation model with results you can trust.
Speaking of “accurate,” remember the old reservoir engineer’s joke about geologists and geophysicists:
- The Boss calls a Reservoir Engineer, a Geologist, and a Geophysicist into his office. He asks each of them the same question: “What is 2+3?”
- The Reservoir Engineer answers: “That would be five-point-zero-zero-zero-zero.”
- The Geologist answers: “It’s somewhere between 4 and 6.”
- The Geophysicist leans in close and answers: “It depends. What would you like to be?”
At the outset of building your reservoir simulation model, geoscientists collect all the seismic data, log data and core data, but these data are static (mostly). To build a viable reservoir simulation you need to be able to visualize the flow of fluids in three dimensions and over time.
tNavigator: The first and only fully integrated 3D reservoir simulation software available anywhere.
With eight software modules all integrated into one, tNavigator is delivered as a single executable file that’s ideal for any size company, whether you’re a vertically integrated major or a small E&P operator.
tNavigator is completely scalable, and best of all, it can cost as much as 90 percent less than other reservoir modeling software programs because pricing isn’t based on the number of cores in use. As a bonus, tNavigator is updated quarterly rather than every year or so.
Go beyond static geologic models — build an integrated workflow, too.
The tNavigator Geology Designer module is just the ground floor in building reservoir simulations — coupled with the other seven tNavigator modules, the sky’s the limit!
All eight tNavigator modules were written by the same programming team using C++ programming language and the CUDA graphic processing unit (GPU) application development interface (API). The software’s parallel technology takes full advantage of multicore CPU and GPU processing power. tNavigator unlocks the full potential of modern computing systems.
tNavigator also takes advantage of the latest computing technologies such as NUMA (non-uniform memory access) clusters that improve performance and expansion, hyperthreading (microprocessor technology that boosts parallelization), and hybrid MPI/SMP multiprocessing applications. That’s why tNavigator reservoir simulations far exceed the performance of any other industry-standard dynamic simulations.
tNavigator users have interactive control of their simulation runs, where they can not only monitor every step of the runtime reservoir simulation, but they can – with just a mouse-click – interrupt and change simulation configurations on-the-fly. And tNavigator simulations often run 20 to 30 or even 100 times faster than other reservoir modeling programs on the market.
If you need it, tNavigator has the capability built in.
With tNavigator and its intuitive GUI interface you can do it all:
- Build static and dynamic reservoir models;
- Run dynamic simulations;
- Characterize the PVT behavior of fluids;
- Build surface network models;
- Calculate artificial lift tables;
- Perform extended uncertainty analysis.
Want to learn more, or try tNavigator yourself? Request a Demo or contact us
