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 SLB reservoir simulation solutions, and you can run the Intersect simulator from Petrel Reservoir Engineering.

Learn more about INTERSECT

Release highlights

The release of Intersect 2023.2 delivers many key features in performance, physics, CO2 storage capabilities, field management, usability, and more. Among others, these features include a new model for mixed-wet capillary pressure hysteresis, improvements to CO2 storage performance and usability, ability to run Intersect simulator and Pipesim™ steady-state multiphase flow simulator coupling in cloud environment, and multiple extensions to multiscale sequential fully implicit and graphics processing unit (GPU) capabilities.

Key enhancements

Physics and CO2 storage

• A new oil-water capillary pressure hysteresis model aimed at mixed-wet reservoirs, in particular carbonates, is now available. The implementation is based on the work of Masalmeh et al. who proposed an extension to the Brooks-Corey and Skjaeveland et al. power-law methods for better conformance to experimental data from mixed wet reservoirs.

• To quantify residual trapping in CO2 storage problems, the new IMMOBILE_VAPOR_COMPONENT_MASS property has been added to the FieldProperties, GridCellProperties, Recurrent3DReport, and RegionProperties nodes. This reports the component mass in the part of the gas saturation that is 'trapped' based on the IMMOBILE_GAS_SATURATION. 

• A new thermal stability method is available for updating the phase state of reservoir cells at each non-linear solver iteration in thermal simulations. By default, the Intersect simulator uses isothermal flash calculations to update the phase state of reservoir cells. The new thermal stability method can be beneficial when the flash algorithm is unable to calculate the phase state of the reservoir cells and fails to converge.

• For isothermal models with component solubility in water (CSIW), a new method is implemented to improve the handling of simulation cells where all components are completely solubilized in the aqueous phase. This method is implemented by default and can improve simulation convergence for certain models.

• Improved validation on K-value pressure tables for aqueous solubility has been added to better handle non-monotonic temperature derivative data.

Field management

•  The Intersect simulator and Pipesim simulator coupled workflow is now available as a controlled commercial offering in On Demand Reservoir Simulation on Delfi™. Because both the Intersect simulator and Pipesim simulator are simulated on a Linux-based OS when using On Demand Reservoir Simulation on Delfi, this workflow provides the true high-performance computing (HPC)-scalable solution for integrated modeling.

• The decline curve modeling workflow has been extended to support the use of reservoir volumes. As a result, workflows such as reservoir voidage replacement with water, water and gas, and water-alternating-gas injection are now supported with decline curve simulations. Additionally, the coverage of the silent skipping mechanism has been extended for entities on static and dynamic lists. 

Performance

• Black-oil fluid models containing vaporized oil (Rv) are now supported in the multiscale sequential fully implicit method. The framework aims to provide speed-up in such cases.
  
  
•  Tracer modeling is now supported in the multiscale sequential fully implicit method. The tracer model and its specification is identical to when it is used in other time discretization methods. Simulations of models with tracers running in multiscale can see the performance benefits of the sequential fully implicit (SFI) formulation.
  
  
•  The natural variable well model is now compatible with the multiscale SFI method.
  
  
• Modeling miscibility by surface tension effects is now supported in full-GPU in black oil and compositional cases. Simulations with this functionality running in GPU hardware should see the benefits of full-GPU acceleration. This feature is enabled by the MiscibleSurfaceTension node and is used to modify the oil and gas relative permeabilities and capillary pressure to reflect the transition from immiscibility to miscibility.
  
  
• The linear interpolation model for three phase oil relative permeability is now supported in full-GPU and benefits from its acceleration. This feature is enabled by the ThreePhaseRelPerm field under the RockMgr node.

Usability

•  You can now request customized reporting for line plots through directly inlined expressions, significantly enhancing their usability. The specification can be through the existing SelectedProperties field or the add_property command under nodes such as FieldProperties, WellProperties, AquiferProperties, and others.