Next* Magazine, Issue 4 - Chevron

PHOTO: MAURA WARNECKEINTERSECT enables Chevron earth scientistsand engineers to incorporate geologicallyrealistic structures into flow simulations.The thin blue line represents a well.For the mammoth Gorgon natural gasdevelopment off the coast of WesternAustralia, INTERSECT sped up project planningand approval and enhanced productionforecasting to help Chevron secure contractsfor future output. And it is helping otheroperations better apply various recoveryprocesses, including steam injection, tounlock heavy oil deposits, which hold greatpromise for supplementing the world’s oilsupplies, noted Viet Hoang, Ph.D., who specializesin adapting INTERSECT for Chevron’shighly complex, thermal heavy oil projectsin Indonesia, the Middle East, South Americaand the United States.“INTERSECT gives us more realistic productionscenarios that we can play with on acomputer,” said Fjerstad. “We can try differentBill Milliken, a Chevron researcher in reservoirsimulation, explains how the colors indicate oilsaturation in the reservoir model. The black rodsshow the location of wells.pressures, inject water, predict how much eachwell will produce—all very expensive to test inthe field. And we can identify the best ways toimprove or redevelop older fields and capturenew oil missed by past development schemes.”The advantage of‘unstructured gridding’INTERSECT depicts the personalities andmoods of reservoirs in greater, sharper detailthan did previous generations of simulators.The earlier technologies broke reservoirsdown into three-dimensional configurationsof rectangular-shaped building blocks.INTERSECT does this better—plus it elevatessimulation wizardry to a new level with“unstructured gridding,” crisply depictingfaults and other difficult areas in the reservoirrock with curvy, individually shaped blocks.The power of speedPerhaps most exciting, INTERSECT worksits magic via parallel processing on highperformancecomputing clusters, dramaticallyincreasing simulation speed. Significant uncertaintyin the understanding of the subsurfacerequires testing a large number of scenarios toconstruct better development plans and fieldimprovements, said Jitendra Kikani, programmanager for INTERSECT at Chevron.At Tengiz, simulations that once tookeight days now take eight hours, Fjerstadadded. For Gorgon, INTERSECT reduced to 10minutes some tasks that once took six hours.Putting INTERSECT to workChevron plans to steadily deploy INTERSECTthroughout its business, focusing first on thetop 20 largest, highest-potential fields and onareas such as the rich, heavily faulted reservoirsoff the coast of Africa.“I believe INTERSECT will give us atechnical and competitive advantage andsignificantly strengthen our overall capabilityas an energy company,” said Tim Magner,general manager of reservoir and productionengineering. “I see it adding a great deal ofvalue for decades to come.” ■Next* | 3