IST Lunch Bunch

Oil and gas production is a complex and capital intensive endeavor with a lot of uncertainty. Leage investment decisions are often made during early field development with the help of reservoir modeling and simulation. However, predicting reservoir performance reliability is extremely challenging, because the subsurface fluid flow can be significantly influenced by rock and fluid properties at multiple scales (from micrometers to kilometers) that are often uncertain, especially in the early phase of development when field data is very limited. In this talk, I will present an overview of the challenges we face in reservoir modeling and simulation and some of the recent progresses we made, from new approaches to mofeling subsurface geology to massively parallel reservoir simulation. Through examples, I will demonstrate the importance of a truly interdisciplinary approach that integrates geosciences, engineering, applied mathematics and computational sciences, highlighting the critical role of the latter.