New Software Release

Product overview

The INTERSECT high-resolution reservoir simulator sets a new standard for reservoir simulation that goes beyond the capabilities offered by current-generation simulators. The result is improved accuracy and efficiency in field development planning and risk mitigation—even for the most complex fields.

The INTERSECT simulator enables engineers to accurately and quickly model.

• Complex geological structures 
• Highly heterogeneous formations 
• Challenging wells and completion configurations 
• Advanced production controls for reservoir coupling and flexible field management.

Petrel Reservoir Engineering constitutes the user environment for all Schlumberger reservoir simulation solutions, and you can run the INTERSECT simulator from Petrel Reservoir Engineering.

Learn more about INTERSECT

Release highlights

The 2023 release of the INTERSECT™ high-resolution reservoir simulator delivers many key features in performance, physics, CO2 storage capabilities, field management, usability, and more. Among others, these features include a new workflow for decline curve modeling, extensions to coupled network functionality, full GPU support for additional functionality, and improvements to CO2 storage functionality, including a set of examples representing injection into a saline aquifer in both isothermal and thermal configurations.

Key enhancements

Field management

• A new decline curve modeling workflow is available, through which a reservoir model can be replaced by a set of decline curves that simulate the individual performance of wells. Decline curves can be generated from a base reservoir simulation (or provided externally), and then replace rigorous reservoir simulation.
  The decline curves seamlessly interact with complex field management logic and can be used in coupling models in conjunction with multiple simulation and network models.
  Due to decline curves performing orders of magnitude faster than a rigorous simulation, they are ideal tools for scenario evaluation and optimization throughout the simulation.

• Looped networks are now supported in the ECLIPSE Network Simulator (ENS), allowing for a performant and efficient method of modeling networks with complex structures in integrated field scenarios.

• Oil removal at junction nodes are now supported in the ECLIPSE Network Simulator (ENS). This enables modeling of splitters in production networks.

Performance

• Residual oil saturation model is now supported in full-GPU, along with its acceleration benefits. This feature can be used to model residual oil saturation that does not vaporize in compositional models.

• Threshold pressure functionality for connections and faults are now supported on GPU at full performance. This option can be used to prevent flow between reservoir areas that are in communication, up to a permitted pressure difference.

• Memory usage improvements in GPU runs have been made for AIM IMPES compositional simulations. This enables larger models to fit into GPU card memory and run.

• Compositional flash statistics and failure reports have been improved, and now report for both CPU and GPU simulations

CO2 storage

• CO2 storage workflow examples are now available, which illustrate the current capabilities in both isothermal and thermal frameworks in saline aquifer environments, including the effect of advanced physics such as solubility, gas and water phase property correction, hysteresis, and diffusion. Joule-Thomson effects are also demonstrated for thermal simulations. The examples are intended to reduce the entry barrier to CO2 storage studies for reservoir engineers of all levels of expertise.
  
  
• AIM IMPES and IMPES are now supported for isothermal component solubility in water (CSIW) simulations. Particularly for large cases of CO2 storage in saline aquifers, AIM IMPES is expected to enhance performance and reduce memory requirements since most of the cells will only experience pressure changes, while saturation changes will typically occur near the injection wells and up to the extent of the gas plume.
  
  
• Solid phase support for isothermal CSIW models is now available. This allows better support for CO2 storage workflows here CO2 dissolution in water and, at a later stage, mineralization of the dissolved CO2 are the two main carbon storage mechanisms. Additionally, these models can now be used alongside the natural variable well model.
  
  
• Usability improvements for Ezrokhi calculations in isothermal CSIW include the fact that water surface density and water molecular weight values are now optional when specifying Ezrokhi for density calculations in isothermal CSIW. When omitted, appropriate values are calculated internally.
  
  
• Validation of aqueous properties in thermal simulations are now provided in the form of warnings, to alert when Ezrokhi inputs would generate unrealistic density or viscosity values.
  
  
• Improved near-critical fluid behavior is provided when the combined phase labeling method is used. This method looks at both critical temperature and saturation pressure, and thus is suitable for the description of components such as CO2 at low temperatures. The new behavior ensures a smooth transition of oil and gas relative permeabilities for near-critical fluids and can improve both accuracy and performance.

Usability

•  Custom initial and recurrent 3D properties can now be requested directly as inline expressions in their respective reporting nodes. This greatly simplifies the process of reporting user-defined 3D properties.
  
  
• New ‘standard’ reporting preset aims to serve as a single setting that overwrites other previously implemented reports and produces an adequate amount of data (both summary and 3D) for most use cases.

• Description of active field management objects can now be printed dynamically to the PRT file in the form of an FM tree, providing a quick summary for inspection of the operational logic summary vectors for water and liquid steam ratios and their cumulative representations can be used to output key performance indicators for thermal steam-assisted operations.

• New summary vectors can be used to report average rates of fields, groups, wells, and completions. These are similar to their corresponding rate properties but include the effect of uptime fraction.

• New reporting property for ‘total mass rate’ has been added for fields, groups, and wells. It reports the sum of all phase mass rates (oil, gas, water, and solvent).

• New reporting summary vectors for water and liquid steam ratios and their cumulative representations can be used to output key performance indicators for thermal steam-assisted operations.

• IXF2CSV workflow has been extended to support additional nodes, including fluid stream compositions and strategies. This enables conversion of IXF syntax to equivalent CSV representations, effectively allowing reservoir engineers to design much of their simulation decks from Excel.

• Hysteresis debug facility now supports output of information about the wetting phase, such as the water and oil-in-gas relative permeability scanning curves for individual grid blocks.

• Chord segment links for looped flow paths are now output to the RFT file for multisegment wells.

• New version of Intel® MPI (v2021.7) is now included with the installation.