Visualization of ensembles of petroleum reservoir models: improvements on the reservoir viewer prototype

• Grant number: 24/00035-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: February 01, 2024
• End date: December 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Mechanical Engineering
• Agreement: Equinor (former Statoil)
• Principal Investigator: Denis José Schiozer
• Grantee: Lays Ide
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Engenharia Mecânica (FEM). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Company: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Faculdade de Engenharia Mecânica (FEM)
• Associated research grant: 17/15736-3 - Engineering Research Centre in Reservoir and Production Management, AP.PCPE

Abstract

The goal of this project is to extend the implementation of the prototype "Reservoir Viewer for Web", which aims to use small multiples and pixelization techniques to show simultaneously a set of reservoir models at a single screen.Aiming to better understand an oil reservoir under study, engineers usually create reservoir models to capture its main features, due to the uncertainties obtained when trying to characterize the reservoir. Each model is a tridimensional matrix with spatial axis, whose cells have properties related to variables such as oil, gas, and water saturation, among others. While there are tools available for interactively visualizing reservoir models, they appear to be unsuitable for comparing a set of models, given that most of these tools show only one reservoir at a time. As an exception, the Java-based software Reservoir Viewer (Silva et al., 2019) uses two visualization techniques (small multiples and pixelization) to simultaneously show a set of reservoir models on the screen. Despite its integration with an in-house software from our research group (SEPIA), it is not easy to integrate the Reservoir Viewer into open-source, web-based tools such as Webviz (Equinor, 2021), due to technological incompatibilities (web-based vs. standalone-based implementations). Previous research and development conducted in EPIC's Phase 1 implemented the Reservoir Viewer's techniques into a web-based prototype compatible with Webviz. That research made progresses on the development of such prototype; however, there are new features to implement in order to add more quality to the prototype and to assess its usefulness to petroleum engineers.In the Phase 2 of EPIC, we plan to do the following enhancements in the Reservoir Viewer plugin for Webviz: adding (or improving) interactivity to the visualizations (e.g., adding interactive visualizations for overviewing clusters of models); improving the layout of Pixelization and Small Multiples techniques by ordering clusters of models and also models inside each cluster; using proper feature vectors of models to speed up the creation of similarity matrices of models (in partnership with Prof. Anderson Rocha of Recod.ai/Unicamp), which will be used for clustering and ordering; and validating the visualizations with users.