SC15 Invited Talk Spotlight: Trends and Challenges in Computational Modeling of Giant Hydrocarbon Reservoirs

Multimodal visualization of giant oil and gas reservoir models.

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 supercomputers. 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 in model construction and simulating the dynamic behavior of these reservoirs.

The benefits of fine-scale simulation are improved accuracy and a higher rate of oil recovery.

Challenges include determination of rock property variation between the wells, accurate location of faults, effective simulation of multi-component, multi-phase transient flow in fractures, complex wells, and rock matrix.

Computational challenges include effective parallelization of the simulator algorithms, cost-effective large-scale sparse linear solvers, discretization, handling multi-scale physics, complex well shapes, fractures, 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 models using billion plus elements, model calibration to historical data, challenges, current status, and future trends in computational modeling in reservoir modeling.

Speaker background:

Dr. Ali H. Dogru

Dr. Ali H. Dogru is a Saudi Aramco Fellow and Chief Technologist of Computational Modeling Technology. Before joining Saudi Aramco in 1996 he worked for Core Labs Inc from 1979 to 1982 and then Mobil R&D from 1982 to 1996.

His academic experiences include University of Texas at Austin; Norwegian Institute of Technology; California Institute of Technology; University of Texas; and Istanbul Technical University. He is a visiting Scientist at Earth Sciences at MIT. He holds a PhD from The University of Texas.

He has 12 U.S. patents, is the recipient of the SPE’s John Franklin Carl award, SPE's Reservoir Description and Dynamics award, and a recipient of World Oil’s Innovative Thinker award. He has published extensively.