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Data gathering and large-scale reservoir modeling will be key to unlocking Anadarko’s

Production big gas development of Mozambique.

Bruce Nichols spoke with Anadarko and engineers at Halliburton’s Landmark to discover more.

Computerizing offshore

Mozambique hen Anadarko made three cells” in it, and it has been “upscaled” to development,” Pande says.

big natural gas discoveries 2.5 million “active cells” for faster pro- Reservoir modeling and its adjunct,

W in quick succession offshore cessing without losing the detail needed reservoir monitoring, are not new.

Mozambique in 2010, the company was to plan development, Pande says. They’ve been a part of the industry for already using computer modeling to de- When Prosperidade begins produc- 60 years. Anadarko has used it on old risk the undertaking. tion in 2018, performance monitoring projects as well as new ones. A notable “We start from day one,” says P.K. will help refne the model and maximize example is Anadarko’s Hugoton feld,

Pande, Anadarko’s Director of Reservoir output over the life of the feld. a low-pressure gas feld straddling the

Technology and Characterization. “We Prosperidade is not the only Kansas-Oklahoma border that has been look at our early models, and we use feld Anadarko has discovered off producing for nearly 100 years, enhanced them as input into making judgments Mozambique. In all, it has drilled more by ever more sophisticated modeling.

about the overall project economics and than 20 wells and has identifed separate Increased computing power and more viability.” natural gas deposits in multi-layered sophisticated software capability have

Now that nine successful wells felds named Golfnho/Atum, Orca and made modeling tools more useful.

have been drilled in the feld named Tubarao, which are in different stages of “One of the things that has really

Prosperidade, the model built using modeling. Prosperidade is the furthest changed, especially in the last 10 years,

Nexus software from Halliburton’s along, Pande says. is our ability to visualize in 3-D. Instead

Landmark unit is in its third develop- “The Prosperidade area has been of just getting quantitative results, we ment cycle. And it has grown more defned by Anadarko, its the partners and have easier ways to actually visualize the detailed. There are 13 million “active the government as a focus of the initial results and get meaning,” Pande says. manager of computation and modeling.

Shell: Future oilfeld models

An example of Shell’s taking advantage of products avail- will dwarf today’s able on the market is its software license and joint develop-

Enhanced computer-based evaluation and visualization is at the ment agreement, announced last September, to use the Baker heart of a big Shell push to improve oil and gas exploration and Hughes JewelSuite (trademark) platform as the basis for high- production. Some of the reservoir modeling technology devel- quality modeling of complex reservoirs.

opment is proprietary within Shell. Some of it is bought of the In a joint announcement, Shell and Baker Hughes said the shelf and customized for Shell in cooperation with the provider. new platform would complement Shell’s existing applications, “While we aggressively invest in proprietary processing including GeoSigns, Shell’s proprietary software used to visual- and visualization technology in the seismic area, we invest ize and interpret seismic data.

more selectively in proprietary reservoir modeling technology The basis of reservoir modeling is mathematical, but the because the market anticipates many of our needs, and we step change of recent years has been the capacity to create 3D communicate with market providers,” says Detlef Hohl, Shell’s models that can be visualized and interactively manipulated

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