Oil & Gas
Reduce risk and maximize reserves with geoscience solutions
Guiding the Oil & Gas industry to solve the toughest E&P challenges
Oil & Gas companies face a multitude of challenges as they explore for, develop, produce, and maintain their hydrocarbon assets. Geological uncertainty often arises when pinpointing the exact location of hydrocarbon reserves due to the inherently complex nature of the subsurface. Not fully understanding the challenges and properly discerning uncertainties can lead to unexpected results during drilling and reservoir management. These investments are capital-intensive and there are considerable safety, environmental, and economic consequences of getting it wrong.
Understanding a reservoir's properties, such as size, shape, porosity, permeability, connectivity, and fluid distribution is crucial for efficient production but can be demanding. Integrating extensive data from sources like seismic surveys, well logs and production data can be a complex and time-consuming process. In addition, thoroughly assessing risk and examining reservoir connectivity or compartmentalization is essential for optimizing field development plans.
As assets mature, the focus shifts to production optimization, which involves balancing and maintaining production rates while effectively managing the reservoir to maximize recovery at the lowest cost possible. This can be a complex task. Achieving smooth operation of multiple wells, often in remote locations, introduces logistical challenges. These intricacies demand the use of advanced monitoring technologies, tight data integration and efficient operational practices, and a comprehensive understanding of reservoir geology, engineering, and the regulatory environment to succeed.
Streamline operations and enhance decision-making with advanced reservoir characterization tools
Our suite of software solutions and professional services delivers a comprehensive toolkit for the Oil & Gas industry, addressing key challenges and providing the technology necessary to tackle complex subsurface challenges across the multitude of conventional and unconventional reservoir types around the world.
These powerful tools are designed to streamline operations and enhance decision-making in an environment where timeframes are constrained, budgets are limited, and human resources are scarce. With GeoSoftware, you gain the upper hand in accelerating decision-making, gaining a clearer understanding of the subsurface, and conquering the toughest subsurface problems.
Oil & Gas solutions across the operations life cycle
Exploration
During the exploration phase, Oil and Gas companies must work with vast seismic datasets and often with limited well control to make decisions on capturing new acreage. This comes with significant financial, legal, and regulatory commitments. The ability to rapidly screen, identify, and quantify drillable targets and in place volumes of hydrocarbon is paramount. With hydrocarbons becoming increasingly scarce, Oil and Gas companies are searching new frontier geographies and geological plays with increasingly complex technical challenges. Drilling in deep water, to extreme target depths or beneath salt diapirs and canopies, or targeting new tight rock and unconventional reservoir layers, combined with excessive pressures and temperatures require some of the most advanced geophysical and engineering methods to be employed in these early project phases.
Minimize Risk
- Establish a predictive petrophysical and rock physics framework to guide seismic anomaly illumination and detection
- Improve prediction accuracy by optimizing legacy and modern seismic datasets using advanced conditioning algorithms to enhance signal to noise
- Rapidly screen large areas to identify anomalies of importance
- Build a lead and prospect inventory, including probabilistic reservoir characterization for risking and ranking of all drillable targets and potential hydrocarbon volumes
Appraisal & Delineation
During appraisal, Oil and Gas operators must determine the financial and operational viability of a discovered resource. Delineating the reservoir and hydrocarbon extents, characterizing source rock quality and the suitability of the rock type and in situ stress for hydraulic stimulation, reducing the range of uncertainty of hydrocarbons in place and identifying reservoir connectivity leading through to an initial understanding of future reservoir performance are all key areas to be addressed. Enough information and knowledge must be gained to establish and build a field development model and plan for economic modeling leading through to final investment decision.
Reduce Uncertainty
- Confirm the presence of commercial hydrocarbon accumulations and the means to extract them
- Develop an accurate, integrated, and predictive reservoir model through well and seismic integration
- Identify compartments or barriers that will drive the field development plan and decisions
- Understand risk and uncertainty through scenario modeling and advanced probabilistic seismic characterization
- Establish awareness of potential drilling hazards that could result in a well collapse or blowouts in advance of the field development plans
Exploitation & Development
In the exploitation and development phase, a highly detailed reservoir model may be constructed and used to perform reservoir simulation. As the model is developed, key questions around well placement, timing, reservoir drainage, and production drive mechanisms need to be considered. Developing a detailed reservoir model that tightly integrates wells and seismic data, while honoring known geological characteristics is vital. Identifying and characterizing small scale (sub-seismic resolution) reservoir heterogeneity can be a critical factor in determining optimal field development. Compartmentalization, flow, and connectivity are first order controls on the production potential in the subsurface that must be understood in detail and can make or break even the best of Oil and Gas projects.
Minimize Development Capex and Optimize Future Production
- Reliable, predictive engineering models and production simulations that integrate all known well and seismic data
- Increase ROI by drilling fewer, more prospective wells in most productive regions
- Improve decision-making by risking and ranking development scenarios that properly capture geological and geophysical data uncertainties as a whole
- Optimize well placement and fracture program design by accurately determining anisotropy and stress orientations using advanced seismic characterization
Production
During the production phase of the project life cycle, emphasis is placed on prolonging oil and gas production while minimizing water/waste production and ensuring a safe and cost-effective ongoing operation. This means carefully monitoring the ongoing effectiveness of primary drive mechanisms such as aquifer or waterflood and making reservoir and/or facility management decisions that will ensure ongoing commercial production rates. Enhanced or secondary and tertiary recovery methods may be employed, each having its own unique set of characteristics and impact on the subsurface rock and fluid behaviors. Reservoir surveillance, whether through time lapse seismic, well based production logging tools (PLT) tracers, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) or other remote sensing techniques becomes a critical tool in extending field life. Near field exploration can also play an important role in late stage economic viability of a given asset.
Enhance Recovery
- Increase production through identification of un-swept compartments and attic oil through high fidelity time-lapse seismic characterization
- Improve well and drilling success rates through tight integration of time-lapse well and seismic data
- Develop enhanced reservoir models that improve secondary and tertiary recovery efforts
- Quantify uncertainty and measure value of information of future drilling activities and campaigns
- Identify risks of out of zone injection, fault reactivation, and seal breach
- Provide optimal inputs for advanced geomechanical modelling to ensure safe operations in depleted reservoirs
Unlock the full potential in Oil & Gas fields with our geoscience solutions