Seismic to simulation in one integrated workflow is the holy grail for the modern asset team — perennially pursued yet nowhere found. Exploration managers know how time-consuming it is to iterate through the field evaluation workflow lifecycle without integration. Yet there is no alternative today without having to sacrifice best-of-breed science.

Now there is a new approach for E&P companies that can help increase productivity and shorten cycle times in prospect evaluation. The Seismic To Simulation Alliance (www.stsalliance.com), comprised of SMT, JewelSuite, and the Computer Modelling Group (CMG), is giving organizations a new alternative. The alliance combines best-of-breed technologies in interpretation, geomodeling, and simulation without sacrificing integration.

This image shows the seismic-to-simulation workflow. (Images courtesy of SMT)

Lost productivity often arises from the time spent moving data across disparate systems. Compounding this problem, disconnected systems cause departments to work in silos and be unable to realize the true value of asset team collaboration. Ultimately, the cost associated with running disparate, non-integrated systems causes some managers to make a devil’s bargain. They give up on best-of-breed capabilities to buy a single-vendor solution that promises internal integration. Yet too often these businesses find that some asset teams still require special cutting- edge technology and, as a result, require the adoption of tools from additional vendors. These organizations end up with the worst of both worlds — lack of integration and limited access to the truly differentiated technology.

Productivity losses

This image shows the seismic-to-simulation workflow. (Images courtesy of SMT)

Of course, desire for integration is understandable, and the advantages are clear. In fact, recent research indicates that just the act of moving data across applications accounts for almost 20% of the overall prospect evaluation timeline. The evaluation time for a new field is about 24 months. This means almost five months of productivity is lost just managing and validating the data! For large independents that spend an average of 35 months evaluating new prospects, this ratio amounts to a staggering seven months in lost productivity. Now multiply this impact across all the prospects an organization is evaluating each year.

But the time lost in moving data across systems is not the only area of productivity loss. Working in silos means less collaboration, resulting in the reduction in work quality. For example, in many organizations reservoir modeling is available only to reservoir engineers. Yet geoscientists can also benefit from sealed earth model creation, property distribution, and fluid flow analyses. Here again the barriers of disparate teams and nonintegrated tools lead to bottlenecks that lengthen the cycle times. In some cases, this lack of universal access can introduce problems in the data integrity. For example, in some organizations the geoscientists’ interpretations are altered by the engineers’ modeling, causing some loss of integrity and resulting in the need for reinterpretation. This cycle can repeat itself over a dozen times before the evaluation can be completed. This costs money.

This image shows the seismic-to-simulation workflow. (Images courtesy of SMT)

The STS approach

One way to solve this problem is to bring these compartmentalized tools down to the generalist and push advanced capabilities onto every desktop. The objective is to enable all involved personnel to see the full picture while retaining experts for the most difficult cases. The STS Alliance believes this approach can help asset teams reduce prospect evaluation cycle times by reducing confusion and increasing collaboration.

However, integration that comes at the cost of leading science does not translate into productivity gains either. This is why the alliance is focused on blending best of breed with lifecycle integration. STS Alliance member SMT provides seismic and geologic interpretation solutions to the industry, with more than 2,700 customers in 95 countries. JewelSuite offers geomodeling capabilities that include patented second-generation gridding that creates more accurate models than legacy “pillar gridding” approaches. CMG provides black oil simulation and enhanced oil recovery and advanced recovery process simulation software used in every producing area around the globe.

A 3-D geologic and seismic interpretation is made more seamless through the STS Alliance.

Each member of the alliance is a focused pure-play software company committed to R&D. It is incumbent on alliance members to maintain technology leadership to survive, and the members have thrived. The combined 250 R&D personnel in the STS Alliance ensures that it can retain its position of technology leadership in the years ahead.

How the integration works is transparent for customers. Organizations can load their seismic and well data into SMT, which is also able to receive data from other interpretation software. Geoscientists can develop their interpretations and move the information back and forth between the interpretation and the geocellular model using JewelSuite technology. Most of this “interpretation while modeling” can be achieved within the same user interface and same data repository. Once there is agreement on the structural and stratigraphic representation, rock and fluid properties can be distributed, and the model may be upscaled or used without upscaling due to the parallel computing efficiency of the CMG simulators. The additional simulation model data such as rock properties and fluid PVT are input in JewelSuite, and the model is ready for simulation. At that point, the simulation model is run directly from JewelSuite and the simulation results can be natively viewed by the asset team along with the seismic interpretation and other geologic and engineering information in JewelSuite. Because the integration is prebuilt, there is no import and export of data, just seamless, single application input and analysis of interpretation and simulation data. In addition, this means that the technology provided by each vendor is available across the entire workflow. For example, Jewelsuite’s patented faulted S-grid gridding, which eliminates the need to verticalize faults and hence creates more accurate representations, can be natively processed by the CMG simulators. This means the greater geologic modeling accuracy provided by the JewelSuite gridding also translates into more accurate representation of the fluid flow from the CMG simulator.

This image shows the STS Alliance workflow.

The STS Alliance does not represent the totality of tools that an organization will need to incorporate in their workflow. E&P businesses have large amounts of data resident in legacy solutions and proprietary workflows that are often dependent on specific applications. These applications cannot just be eliminated. Instead, this information needs to be incorporated into the overall asset evaluation workflow. This is why a key objective for the alliance is to ensure coexistence within any environment. A software development kit (SDK) allows for plug-ins to be made from existing applications into the STS Alliance product line. In the year ahead, this SDK capability will be further advanced to ensure that more applications can be quickly incorporated into the STS Alliance workflow.

Moving forward, the STS Alliance will continue to tie together the asset evaluation workflow more closely while allowing organizations the ability to mix and match the components that are of greatest value to them. Visit www.stsalliance.com/demo to see the entire workflow in action.