New Software Release

Release highlights

The release of Intersect™ 2023.3 delivers many key features in performance, physics, CO2 storage capabilities, field management, usability, and more. Among others, these features include a new automatic tuning option, a complete energy consumption and emissions framework inside field management, automated data quality control for relative permeabilities, and additional feature support for full-graphics processing unit (GPU) and multiscale sequential fully implicit functionality.

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Key enhancements

Physics and CO2 storage

• The rock internal energy calculation contains a volumetric heat capacity term which is dependent, by default, on the square of the difference between the grid cell temperature and a reference temperature. An alternative approach often found in literature is now available and considers the difference between the square of these two quantities instead.
  
  
• To allow for more flexibility in matching experimental data and correlations, the liquid density model in thermal simulations has been expanded with a new term consisting of the product of pressure, temperature (both relative to reference values), and a thermal compressible coefficient.
  
  
• A new method for initializing existing solids in the reservoir using SolidVolumeFractionDepthTable depth tables, has been added to support geochemistry workflows, where significant quantities of in-situ minerals might dissolve with processes such as CO2 injection. This approach allows the volume of solids to be defined as a fraction of the rock volume of the cell, rather than its pore volume.

Field management

• Field management now includes the energy transition metrics of consumption and emissions reduction, in addition to the existing revenue optimization considerations. The logic framework can make decisions, such as prioritizing wells that are more energy efficient, or limiting the overall energy consumption of an asset over time.
  
  
• The decline curve modeling workflow has been extended to support the use of multipoint IPR curves. Full inflow performance relationship (IPR) curve modeling is preferred where the wells either exhibit significant non-linearity in the shape of the IPR curve, or coning behavior in which the gas-oil ratio or water cut varies with the production. 

Performance

• A new AutomaticTuning field has been added to improve the performance of simulation runs. Convergence bottlenecks, that often do not harm solution accuracy, are eliminated through several techniques, including an intelligent time stepping method, an adaptive set of heuristics to the tuning criteria, and tailored numerical methods. When tested over a range of realistic models, an average 2x speed-up was observed, with gains as large as 5x.
  
  
• Full-GPU acceleration is now enabled for cases that use the capillary number dependent relative permeability feature. This enables the modeling of miscibility effects through a three-phase miscible relative permeability model, where three-phase oil and gas relative permeabilities are linearly interpolated between an immiscible, and a miscible curve based on the miscibility of the fluids in the cell.
  
  
• The region threshold pressure functionality is now supported on GPU, and cases with this feature should benefit from full-GPU acceleration. You can use this option to prevent flow between adjacent regions up to a pressure difference, which can be specified or defaulted to the minimum pressure required to prevent flow between the regions.
  
  
• Advanced rock compaction options present under the RockTableHysteresis node are now compatible with multiscale sequential fully implicit simulation, and should benefit from the performance benefits of the framework.

Usability

• A new functionality enables the automatic smoothing of relative permeability curves to two popular curve types (Corey and LET). When testing this feature, cases that respond positively to this implementation often showed a performance improvement of 10-20%. However, in some cases with extremely discontinuous input, up to 2x speed-up was observed.
  
  
• The ActiveCellBehavior field has been added to provide more flexibility in the cell activation definition for matrix and fracture cells that are specified with ACTIVE_CELL_FLAG in dual porosity and dual permeability models. Four options enable you to copy the cell activation specification to and from matrix and fracture cells as required.