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Interactive Modeling, Visualization & Visual Analytics Challenges in Reservoir Geoscience and Engineering

Mario Costa Sousa
University of Calgary, Canada

Exploration and Production (E&P) of oil/gas involve economically valuable but complex tasks. They comprise workflows with pipelined processes and inter-related disciplines (Geophysics, Geology, Reservoir and Production Engineering, Business and Economic Analysis) throughout the E&P life cycle of exploration, appraisal, development and production. In this cycle, the available data presents various levels of inaccuracies, sparseness, scale, uncertainty, and interactive modeling and visualization requirements.

Creating Reservoir Geoscience and Engineering (G&E) software applications allowing users to gain insightful and actionable information from such vast amounts of datasets is a challenging problem. Visualization technologies play a critical role in such applications. The fundamental goal is to present, transform and convert data into an efficient and effective visual representation that users can rapidly, intuitively and easily explore, understand, analyze, and comprehend. As a result, data is transformed into information and then into knowledge.

Visualization in oil and gas E&P began with the introduction of interpretation workstations in the early 1980s, progressing towards 3D voxel-based visualization and interpretation technology in the early 1990s. Advances in the fields of scientific & information visualization, computer graphics, high-performance computing, and human-computer interaction have enabled a significantly large range of reservoir visualization tasks. Today, visualization in reservoir G&E faces greater challenges due to the intersection of these advances with access to a broader range of data and application integration, the increasing uncertainty and complexity on the available information, and multi-disciplinary collaborative decision-making.

In this presentation I will discuss and motivate research and development on key issues about these categories of challenges and the requirements for novel interactive exploratory and scalable modeling, visualization and visual analytics solutions. I will bring specific examples from our recent works on key project themes that have been identified in conjunction with participating companies, as necessary to advance the interactive visualization, analysis, and understanding of oil and gas reservoirs within the E&P life cycle. I will discuss how these tools can benefit the E&P business by enabling better reservoir modeling and integrated workflows, creating new engineering opportunities and improving the collaborative interaction, exploratory visual data analysis, and decision-making process.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #120034©2012 AAPG Hedberg Conference Fundamental Controls on Flow in Carbonates, Saint-Cyr Sur Mer, Provence, France, July 8-13, 2012