Predicting oil and gas field behaviours is a difficult yet crucial task for multidisciplinary teams consisting of geophysicists, geologists, reservoir engineers and other decision-makers. By offering Roxar software and services for workflows from geological modeling to reservoir simulation, Emerson helps its customers make informed decisions on where to drill, production strategies and how to maximize oil and gas recovery throughout a prospect lifecycle.
Uncertainty Management
The Roxar reservoir management software portfolio is a key element of Emerson Process Management, a leader in facilitating businesses to automate their production, processing and distribution in many industries, including oil and gas. Founded in 1890, Emerson is a global Fortune 500 company, currently with some 115,000 employees working to develop the point ‘where technology and engineering come together to create solutions for the benefit of customers’.
Kjetil Fagervik, Managing Director of Roxar Software Solutions. (Emerson)With Roxar reservoir management software, Emerson has the opportunity to go beyond its traditional seismic to simulation domain. By combining its software and services with other Emerson oilfield technologies, the company is able to offer systems for dayto-day reservoir management decisionmaking and action-taking consistent with an operator’s overall reservoir strategy. These systems will act as the ‘brains’ for complex process management in the entire reservoir life cycle, from field development and optimization of production from individual wells, through to allocation of production.
Uncertainty management is an essential component in the workflows for this strategy, so a focus area for Emerson is enabling this to happen through the complete seismic to simulation process, which may include alternative seismic interpretations and multiple realizations of the reservoir model. The Emerson software module Roxar Tempest ENABLE allows users to create ensemble-based prediction workflows and better quantify uncertainty in production forecasts. The innovations in this software are the results of a Total Uncertainty Management program undertaken with Statoil, together with long-term collaboration on the development of statistical algorithms with the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the UK’s Durham University.
Entire Reservoir Lifecycle Solutions
Consistent with its aim to assist oil companies with their reservoir management decision-making throughout the reservoir lifecycle, Emerson has recently strengthened its upstream capabilities through the acquisition of Norwegian company Yggdrasil, a provider of integrated flow assurance and production optimization software, known as METTE. This solution provides operators with flow performance calculations for wells and flow lines, integrated field modeling for life-of-field simulation and optimization, and virtual metering for the allocation of production to wells. The hardware descriptions and outputs generated through METTE can be easily linked with leading reservoir simulators in the market, including the Roxar Tempest MORE simulator. Key benefits to operators include flexible production performance calculations, fast network simulation and improved life-of-field integrated flow assurance.
Emerson will incorporate Yggdrasil’s METTE solution into the Roxar reservoir management software portfolio, effectively expanding the company’s software solutions to the entire exploration and development of a reservoir, from seismic interpretation and modeling to reservoir simulation and production, thus enabling operators to continuously monitor production and forecast future reservoir performance. The result is a completely integrated production modeling system that can be used to refine and develop production strategies and field development concepts.
Kjetil Fagervik, Managing Director of Roxar Software Solutions at Emerson Process Management, told GEO ExPro magazine that Emerson believes it is important to respond to market developments, and that combining complementary solutions in this way will help clients to align their modeling, uncertainty quantification and simulation data with production, and thus optimize their field development and production plans. Ultimately, this will enable them to increase oil and gas recovery despite today’s challenging environment.
