As world demands for energy increase, the Alberta Government and other jurisdictions want less reliance on current production methods for oil, coal, and gas recovery. Methods need to be developed that recover the significant amount of energy sources currently left behind. Governments want methods that are less energy intensive and reduce the impact of greenhouse gases and other remissions. The goal of this research focus is to develop key technologies to assist in achieving production and reserve targets for both conventional and unconventional resources while minimizing environmental impacts.

Our portfolio of current projects in Energy includes:

Rapid Reservoir Modeling and Visualization (RRMV)

Constructing or refining complex reservoir models at the appraisal, development, or production state is a challenging, time-consuming task with a high degree of uncertainty.  The lack of an intuitive set of modeling, simulation and visualization tools that support expert interpretation from geophysicist, geologists and reservoir engineers significantly increases the challenge.  A particular limitation is the lack of software that allows conceptual models to be rapidly created, using a simple, intuitive interface, and then interrogated for key reservoir properties and behaviors.  This project will support the University of Calgary and other partners in the development of Rapid Reservoir Modeling (RRM) software for prototyping complex reservoir models, by means of novel, interactive, modeling techniques, exploratory visualization, and numerical analysis.  The project will deliver RRM workflows vetted by industry partners to ensure that the platform will be capable of modeling the problems that are most critical.

Collaborators:
Dr. Mario Costa Sousa  (Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Alberta Innovates Academy (Alberta Innovates Technology Futures), Foundation CMG Industrial Research Chair in Scalable Reservoir Visualization)
IBM Research – Brazil

Reservoir Simulation on Massively Parallel Systems and Underground Coal Gasification (UCG)

Using a high performance computing environment, the research group led by Dr. John Chen has over the past few years advanced the state-of-the-art in model creation, and attracted numerous investors for reservoir and UCG modeling and simulation.  This work will have a direct and positive impact on Alberta companies, as well as international investors in the Alberta Oil Sands.  The aim of this project is to move these models into the context of IBM’s massively parallel, big data and high performance current and next generation super-computing environments to determine a new level of knowledge and information that can be gained for energy developers in the Province

Collaborators:
Dr. John Chen, Professor (Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, University of Calgary NSERC/AERI/Foundation CMG Chair In Reservoir Simulation; iCORE Industrial Chair in Reservoir Modeling, Director, iCentre Simulation & Visualization)
Data Centric Systems, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center