Roxar signs agreement with Norwegian Computing Center
Posted: 13 March 2006
Roxar reported the signing of a three-year agreement with the Norwegian Computing Center, a private, independent, non-profit research foundation.
The agreement will direct the Norwegian Computing Center’s leading edge research on reservoir modeling and simulation towards Roxar’s IRAP RMS software.
The Norwegian Computing Center will use Roxar as an exclusive commercialisation partner for reservoir modeling software and, in return, Roxar will commit to a certain volume of purchased research projects.
The agreement, which was made with the Norwegian Computing Center’s Statistical Analysis of Natural Resources Data (SAND) department, will ensure that Roxar retains its position as the leading provider of stochastic reservoir modeling software through its flagship 3D reservoir modeling software, IRAP RMS™ and in particular the module, RMSgeoplex. The agreement and the resulting technology innovations in reservoir modeling will help E&P companies model their reservoirs with greater accuracy, reduce uncertainty and maximize reservoir performance.
RMSgeoplex, one of 14 IRAP RMS™ modules, is the industry benchmark for facies and property modeling and the key stochastic reservoir modeling module within IRAP RMS™. Through a process of randomly determined sequences of observations, each of which is considered a sample of one element from a probability distribution, RMSgeoplex allows the operator to build realistic descriptions of geological features influencing fluid flow, while, at the same time, honoring well and seismic data. The Norwegian Computing Center was one of the key architects behind the core simulation algorithms of RMSgeoplex.
The Norwegian Computing Center is a private, independent, non-profit research foundation and one of the leading technical and industrial research institutes in Norway. The SAND department was established in 1984 with its primary goal being to use statistical methods to reduce and quantify risk and uncertainty within the reservoir through the stochastic modeling of the geology, including upscaling and history matching.
“Roxar is a company which is always innovating – always looking to adopt new pioneering technologies to help E&P companies maximize their reservoir performance. In order to do this, however, it is essential that we partner with the best minds in the industry,” said Roxar CEO, Sandy Esslemont.
“Through this agreement with the Norwegian Computing Center, we have done just that, ensuring that we can describe with ever greater accuracy the structural, lithological and the petrophysical characteristics of the reservoir and the uncertainty associated with it. The Norwegian Computing Center has already played a central role in making RMSgeoplex an industry benchmark for stochastic modeling and we look forward to many more joint successes over the coming years.”
His words were back up by Petter Abrahamsen, Director of SAND at the Norwegian Computing Center:
“We are delighted to be partnering with Roxar today to further the development of reservoir modeling and bring geological realism and the scale of heterogeneity - so important to fluid flow - more into the model. The result will be greatly reduced risk and uncertainty in reservoir development and the modeling tools to maximize reservoir performance.”
Roxar has had a close relationship with the Norwegian Computing Center for the past 15 years. The center is Roxar’s main research partner on its FieldWatch™ project – a study of right-time integration of production data in reservoir characterization and fluid flow simulations. The three year project is being funded one third each by Statoil, Roxar and the Norwegian Research Council’s PETROMAKS Research & Development (R&D) program.
10 percent of the Norwegian Computing Center’s research in 2005 was from non-Norwegian companies. The center currently has five percent basic governmental funding with an additional 20 percent in funding from The Norwegian Research Council through various research projects. Most of these projects have additional sponsoring from the oil and gas industry.
The SAND department has made a significant international contribution to research and services within reservoir description, stochastic modeling and geostatistics for the oil industry.
RMSgeoplex helps E&P companies understand the influence of facies distribution on fluid flow – a key element in increasing recovery. RMSgeoplex has been designed to capture geologically realistic facies geometries that are correctly constrained to well and seismic data. The facies modeling algorithms have a unique track record of successful application to clastic and carbonate reservoirs.
IRAP RMS comprises 14 fully integrated software modules including mapping, modeling, planning and workflow management tools designed to help geologists, reservoir engineers and geophysicists increase productivity from existing fields and to shorten the discovery-to-production lifecycle.
Posted by Richard Price, Editor EnergyME.com
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