New Software Release

The release of Intersect™ 2026.3 delivers many key features in performance, physics, usability, and more.

Key release highlights

The Intersect™ reservoir simulator now supports NVIDIA Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) and more scalable multi‑GPU runs.

The Intersect simulator supports NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPU architecture, including both data center and workstation GPUs across NVIDIA B200, B300, and the RTX PRO Blackwell Server and Workstation Edition series.

This update delivers a major improvement in multi‑GPU performance and scalability. This was achieved by reducing both the amount of data transferred between GPUs and how often GPUs need to communicate.

• Smarter well-to-processor assignment: A new scheduling algorithm assigns wells to processors to minimize well-related communication while preserving load balance.
• More efficient linear solver: New solver algorithms reduce communication frequency and move well-matrix operations onto the GPU to accelerate computation.

Scalability over modern CPU and GPU hardware performed using a 10 million cell model, highly heterogeneous analogue of Brazilian pre-salt.

Improve thermal recovery performance for embedded discrete fracture modeling (EDFM) thermal simulation.

EDFM now supports thermal simulation, extending fracture modeling capabilities to capture heat transfer within hydraulic and natural fractures, as well as between fractures and the surrounding rock matrix.

This enhancement enables engineers to evaluate temperature-driven changes in fluid and rock properties in natural and hydraulically fractured reservoirs undergoing thermal recovery processes, and in geothermal applications. The capability builds on the proven thermal simulation framework of the Intersect simulator, including matrix rock thermal behavior, wellbore heat-loss modeling, with overburden and underburden heat exchange, and temperature-dependent fluid properties.

Together, these capabilities provide a more complete foundation for optimizing geothermal and thermal recovery applications, including completion design, well placement, and circulation strategies. Variable thermal conductivity models for EDFM are not supported in this release.

Thermal effect modeled with embedded discrete fracture modeling (EDFM)

Improve production forecast and CO₂ integrity studies with coupled geomechanics and reservoir flow simulation

With Intersect 2026.3, Visage™ 2026.1, and Petrel™ 2026.1, users can now directly couple Intersect simulator and Visage finite-element geomechanics simulator cases with EDFM grids, improving the simulation of complex fractured reservoirs and unconventional shale assets.  Direct coupling with the Visage simulator allows the simulation to account for the interaction between fluid pressure within the fracture network and the effective stress on fracture planes provided by the Visage simulator. This enables more accurate and robust modeling of fluid flow through naturally occurring and hydraulically created fractures. 

This integration enables the model to capture stress-induced changes in fracture aperture and permeability, delivering a more dynamic and realistic representation of how stress variations from reservoir depletion affect fluid-flow pathways. Using the coupled approach in EDFM cases helps users better understand and forecast production performance in fractured reservoirs where geomechanical effects play a significant role.

Higher fidelity and better visualization of EFEM fault and fracture results displayed on 2D patches

Learn more about the Intersect simulator

Key enhancements

Physics and new energies

• Aquifer initial composition initialization is now supported. The composition of numerical and analytical aquifers at simulation start can now be initialized from the average composition of connecting reservoir cells.
• In adaptive implicit method (AIM) and implicit pressure explicit saturation (IMPES) simulations with large capillary pressures, variations in saturation are effectively turned into variations in pressure, potentially leading to instability. From Intersect 2026.3, users can limit the rate of change of capillary pressure in explicit cells which can improve numerical stability while preserving the modeling of capillary-driven processes such as imbibition.
• Water phase datum pressure can now be honored during water only cells initialization. This feature is essential for the subsurface carbon storage modeling workflow for CO₂ injection in saline aquifers.
• The SEPARATED well head model in the Intersect simulator is now extended to support height of liquid level as an alternative to the existing pressure at liquid level. The new field allows users to specify the difference between the height of the liquid-gas interface and the bottom hole reference depth of the well, which is used to distinguish gas and liquid zones in the well. This functionality can be used to model a stable liquid-gas interface that changes the drawdown in the well connections. This is a common feature of wells in coal seam gas (CSG) reservoirs.

Field management

• The Intersect simulator now supports membrane splitters to model gas recovery processes. A component recovery fraction table defines the split of an inlet stream into permeate and non-permeate streams, with any flow above a specified maximum rate diverted to a bypass stream. Output streams can be routed to other field management (FM) processes, such as re-injection.
• The well model has been enhanced to allow gas production rates to be calculated and controlled at reservoir volume conditions. This is supported in black-oil, compositional, and thermal simulations.
• Graphics processing units (GPU) are now supported for reservoir coupling allowing reservoir-coupled runs to use single-GPU or multi-GPU configurations for individual child cases, in any combination with CPU-only child cases.
• More features have been added to the IxNetwork development. A new NetworkFluidRemoval node has been introduced to remove a selected phase from a node using a fractional removal setting and/or a maximum phase removal rate. The NetworkPipe node now supports additional summary vectors for network pipes, including phase rates and pressure drop.
• Additional reporting property identifiers have been added for network nodes supported by Pipesim™ steady-state multiphase flow simulator.

Systems

• A new compression technique has been used to optimize packages to reduce download sizes and speed up transfer time. The Intersect 2026.3 DVD size is significantly reduced.