GigaPOWERS™ ^Popular

The Saudi Aramco EXPEC Advanced Research Center debuted its giga-cell reservoir simulation technology, GigaPOWERS™, Jan. 23 in front of an overflowing audience in the EXPEC Auditorium.

GigaPOWERS™ is the second generation of Saudi Aramco’s leading reservoir simulator, POWERS (Parallel Oil, Water and Gas Enhanced Reservoir Simulator), which is used to simulate fluid movement in the reservoir to optimize production and injection, and the management of the reservoir.

GigaPOWERS™ sets a new industry record of being able to simulate giant fields at seismic or near-seismic resolution, thus doing away with the conventional industry practice of averaging the simulation model cells in order to reduce their number, which also reduces the amount of information in the model. It can simulate models in excess of one billion cells (“giga-cell”), producing a more accurate simulation. Just like a megapixel camera, in which a higher number of pixels (resolution) yields more accurate images, the higher number of cells in the simulation model leads to more accurate simulation of the reservoir.

“This is an exciting day for Saudi Aramco and a testimony of our success in providing cutting-edge technical solutions to manage our fields and reservoirs,” said Amin H. Nasser, senior vice president of Exploration and Producing, who kicked off the event with the live full-field simulation of the largest field in the world, Ghawar. “This cornerstone technology, GigaPOWERS™, allows us to more accurately simulate and predict the behavior of our fields and reservoirs and better optimize our production strategies.”

“This achievement celebrates the commitment and support received from Saudi Aramco management and the perseverance and strong teamwork of the CMT-POWERS members who have dedicated years to the success of this major technology development,” said Ali Dogru, chief technologist of the EXPEC ARC Computational Modeling Technology Team and the pioneer behind POWERS and today’s GigaPOWERS™. “The need to simulate the Saudi Arabian fields in their entirety presented an attractive challenge many years ago. The business need and resources to push the limits of computational power to the billion-cell model — and beyond — only existed at Saudi Aramco. Working at Saudi Aramco provided me with this unique opportunity to develop an industry-leading technology.”