Improving the assessment of potential for buried oil and gas reservoirs

Published: 25 September 2015

A new software tool that characterizes the properties of deltaic sedimentary deposits in 3D will be developed by Deltares and Delft University of Technology for Statoil, a leading company in oil and gas production. The resulting output can be used to improve the assessment of the potential of buried oil and gas reservoirs. The new software tool Delft3D-GeoTool (GT) incorporates Delft3D’s hydrodynamic and morphodynamic modules with the open software Open Earth to facilitate data management and analysis.

New type of reservoir characterisation complementary to existing techniques

Due to the necessity to improve the recovery from hydrocarbon reservoirs there is a strong demand for consistent assessments of reservoir properties complementary to existing techniques. Delft3D-GT enables a new type of reservoir characterisation that is derived from autonomous process based forward model simulations. Delft3D-GT substantially improves the capabilities for Statoil to characterise the heterogeneity and connectivity of these reservoirs for feasibility and recovery potential assessments. It is expected that Delft3D-GT becomes part of the oil industry’s standard reservoir characterisation work flow as it allows geologists to easily and intuitively create a 3D numerical analogue from well and outcrop data.

Morphology and stratigraphy in a numerical analogue, a fluvio-deltaic geobody simulated with Delft3D. Numerical analogues provide high-resolution 3D data to populate reservoir models.

Open source software license agreement

Delft3D-GT constitutes a unique combination of state-of-the-art process-based forward modelling capabilities with user-friendly web-based interfacing, online data management and interpretation-aggregation tools. Delft3D-GT will be developed under an open source software license agreement (GPL-V3). The expected delivery data of Delft3D-GT to Statoil is February 2017.