Ian Gates's presentation from Cybera's 2007 Banff Cyberinfrastructure Summit

1. CI Applications in the
Oil and Gas Sector
Ian D. Gates
Chemical & Petroleum Engineering
University of Calgary
Marcel Bourque
SGI Canada

2. Canada’s Place
 Canada is One of the Few Countries that will be
Raising Petroleum Production in the next 10 Years

3. Recovery Technology is the Key
 Conventional Oil Harder to Find and Require
More Intensive Recovery Processes for
Production
 Heavy Oil becoming Major Source for
Petroleum Energy
 Unconventional Gas e.g. CBM, Tight Gas
becoming Major Source for Gas
 What was Once Inaccessible Petroleum is Now
becoming a Target for Production

4. The Numbers
 New Technologies Needed to Extract the
Remaining Oil
 Environmental Issues Key

5. Heavy Oil
Becoming important source
of energy and petroleum
feed stock
Typically, in situ
Viscosity ~
100,000 -
5,000,000 cP

6. Heavy Oil Growth
Roughly 10 Trillion Barrels of Heavy Oil Resource
This is about 3x that of Conventional Oil Resource
In Alberta, have about 2 Trillion Barrels Heavy Oil
Key Question:
What is the best technology available to recover
this resource ?
How much of this resource is recoverable ?

7. Heavy Oil Recovery
Typically, in Alberta, Recovery Factor for Heavy Oil
is between 10 and 50% depending on Recovery
Technology
For the future, need to consider what is currently
considered Inaccessible Reservoirs:
Bitumen from Carbonates
Bitumen from Thin Pay (< 15 m)

8. Heavy Oil Growth
Heavy Oil and Bitumen Production Becoming
Increasingly More Important !

9. Heavy Oil Growth in Alberta
Alberta In-Situ Bitumen Production
Source: AEUB ST-53
500
450
400
350
Bitumen (kBPD)
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
CSS SAGD Cold Flow HWs Waterflood

10. Heavy Oil Growth in Alberta
→ Cold Lake Bitumen
11 API; 1-300,000 cP
Peace River Bitumen
9-10 API; 200,000 cP
Athabasca Bitumen
8-9 API; 2-5 Million cP
→ 1996-2002, oil sands industry
spent over $19 Billion on new
projects
→ ~$100 Billion may be spent on
new projects in the 2003-2020
period
→ Large water, natural gas, & diluent
requirements

11. Reservoirs are Complex and Multiscale

12. Simplified Data Workflow

13. Business Drivers for HPC in Oil & Gas
 Need to Improve Efficiency & Automate Tasks; Shorter
Execution Times
 Use More Complex Reservoir Models & Physics; More
Analysis Needed; More Simulations Done
 Have Less Easy Oil; Nonconventional Sources;
Exploration More Expensive and Difficult than Ever
 Need to Maximize Productivity from Existing Assets
 Data Acquisition Larger than Ever
 HURDLE: OIL & GAS OFTEN NOT EARLY ADOPTERS

14. HPC Computing in Oil & Gas
 Data Integration from Multiple Sources;
Superlarge Datasets
 Geological Modelling & Visualization
 Reservoir Modelling, Simulation, Post-
Processing, & Visualization
 Recovery Process Design & Optimization
 Risk Management & Uncertainty Analysis
 Seismic Processing
 Remote Teamwork & Communication
 ENABLES DECISION MAKING

15. Reservoir Characterization & Visualization
3D Cave Environments
(Courtesy Schlumberger)
(Courtesy Windsprint)

16. Remote Team Collaboration
(Courtesy Schlumberger)

17. Reservoir Simulation
Geology; Properties of rocks;
Models; Data Integration
Reservoir Engineering, Process Design, Optimization,
Multirealizations; Fluid Mechanics, Heat & Mass Transfer

18. Physics in Reservoir Simulators
 Capabilities:
1. Darcy and non-Darcy flow,
2. heat transfer (heat losses to overburden understrata; conduction; convection; in
situ heat generation; impact of temperature on fluid properties, reactions, rock-
fluid and other properties),
3. mass transfer (reactant and product diffusion, dispersion, and convection),
4. chemical and geochemical reactions (in situ upgrading; biodegradation and
bioreactions; reactions of injectants with reservoir rock; definition of reactions
and components; reaction order and rate constants and other associated
parameters),
5. phase behaviour (PVT properties and representation in reservoir simulator;
breakdown of heavy oil and bitumen into pseudocomponents; biodegradation
phase behaviour),
6. formation impacts (plugging of formation by heavier reaction products; flow of
catalyst in formation and solids transport),
7. geomechanics (thermal expansion and thermally-induced shear; dilation;
fracture formation and propagation; wormhole formation),
8. geophysics (rock physics; synthetic seismograms), and
9. wellbore flow (multiphase flow in undulating wellbores; design of wellbore
trajectory).

19. Simulation Implementation Issues
• Part one of the problem – due to amount of data and
size of problem, multiscale simulations take lots of
time
• Part two of the problem – usually one simulation run
is not sufficient – need to run several to many
hundreds and thousands to choose the right course
of action
• Part three of the problem – existing software does
not make full use of new software/hardware
technologies that address the above issues

20. Simulation Implementation Issues
• Large amounts of data, huge simulations,
multiple iterations, not an isolated single run
• Computing community has responded with
standardized Parallel Computing
• Industry have also responded by developing
dedicated Hardware Co-simulators
• The two points above produce speed
increases of orders of magnitude
• Programming languages, compilers,
processor types do not

21. Optimization: 100s to 1000s of Runs

22. Thermal-Solvent Recovery Process Design

23. Resistance to Early Adoption of
Grid/HPC
 Culture and Adversity to Risk; Tape Storage
 Proprietary Data & Security; Competitive Advantage
 Network Data Transfer Capability, Security, &
Storage Needs to be Expanded
 Unclear Benefits; Few Proven Cost / Benefit
 Lots of Legacy Code; Few Applications Capable of
Full Utilization of Grid/HPC
 Network Capabilities / Costs to Link Clusters
 People and Skills; User Education

24. Where is Oil & Gas Now?
 Overall Limited Linked grids and Use of HPC
 Single Applications that Often Do Not Scale
beyond about 4 to 8 Processors
 Main Applications: Seismic, Reservoir Modeling
 Running into Data Management Constraints
 Yet More Interest in Benefits of Grid/HPC
 Note: Seismic Processing quite Mature

25. Major Growth for the Future
 Main Growth in Reservoir Simulation with Move
towards Design Optimization, Risk and
Uncertainty Assessment
 Growth in Data Transfer, Storage, & Management
with Security as Major Concern
 Remote Collaboration