Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Trends and Challenges in Numerical Simulation of Giant Hydrocarbon Reservoirs

Ali H. Dogru , Saudi Aramco Fellow and head of Reservoir Simulation Development

Abstract

Giant oil and gas reservoirs continue to play an important role in providing energy to the world. Nowadays, state of the art technologies are utilized to further explore and produce these reservoirs since a slight increase in the recovery amounts to discovering a mid-size reservoir somewhere else. Mathematical modeling and numerical simulation play a major role in managing and predicting the behavior of these systems using large super computers. With the aid of evolving measurement technologies, a vast amount of geoscience, fluid and dynamic data is now being collected. Consequently, more and more high resolution, high fidelity numerical models are being constructed. However, certain challenges still remain. Challenges include modeling of initial conditions caused by incomplete understanding of oil and gas migration into traps, significant variation in fluid and rock property within the reservoirs, proper modeling of multiple porosity systems, faults and fractures. Computational challenges include cost effective large scale parallel sparse linear solvers, handling multi scale physics, complex well shapes, complaint software engineering with the rapidly evolving super computer architectures and effective visualization of very large data sets. This presentation will cover examples for the giant reservoir with billion plus elements and a trillion cell oil migration problem. Model calibration to historical data, challenges, current status and future trends in computational modeling will be discussed. Bio Ali H. Dogru is a Saudi Aramco Fellow and head of Reservoir Simulation Development. He is a graduate of UT in 1974. His academic experience include UT Austin, Norwegian Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, Istanbul Technical University and MIT. His industrial experience includes Core Labs Inc. and Mobil R&D Corp in Dallas and Saudi Aramco in Saharan. He is recipient of several SPE awards including John Franklin Carll, has a number of US patents and technical publications. He is a member of US National Academy of Engineering.