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Pande says production drivers.

more important “Just having more complexity that both than powerful hardware and software allow does not computers and necessarily mean you’re going to get a sophisticated better product,” he says.

Production software is good Pande notes that there are a lot of good commercial reservoir modeling software products, judgment – the that all the major service companies and ability to decide some niche operators offer good tools.

wisely whether wisely whether Aside from Halliburton-Landmark to spend money to spend money Nexus and Decision-Making System, on a project, based on a project, based there are Schlumberger’s Eclipse and on what a model is on what a model is Intersect; Baker Hughes’ JewelSuite; showing about key showing about key Emerson’s Roxar RMS, and CMG’s IMEX,

GEM and STARS, to name a few.

“We could have done equally as good

Depiction of Nexus Depiction of Nexus a job on any other products because software. software. it’s more about how you apply this. It’s

Image: Halliburton.Image: Halliburton.

How Halliburton built Nexus

Uncertainty analysis, in fact, is a growing focus in modeling

Creating software that can model an oil or gas reservoir involves oil? eld reservoirs.

writing lines of code that can perform billions of calculations “What we want to try and do is deliver this envelope of possi- per second. The software runs simultaneously on clusters of ble outcomes, and then it’s up to the decision-makers to decide computers linked by high-speed interconnections. how they want to go and size the project. Think about capac-

But it still can take a couple of days to ? nish a model. And ity for, let’s say, water-handling up front. To build that into the when you’re done, you still can’t be sure what the subsurface platform, that’s expensive. But it’s nowhere near as expensive as looks like, even after you drill and produce it. After all, you can’t having to retro? t later on when you get a surprise,” Lynch says.

actually see it. Uncertainty is enormous at the exploration and appraisal

Welcome to the world of using computers to model oil ? elds stage. “In those early stages, you’re in an extremely speculative and monitor their performance as they age. mode in your modeling. You’re at the point of trying to decide do “What we are doing is solving a complex set of four-dimen- we sink hundreds of millions or more into developing this ? eld. sional partial di