Reducing Reservoir Simulation Run Times With ECHELON Software

ECHELON software reduces reservoir simulation run times by up to 30x faster than legacy simulators.

Bg case operator in atlantic canada

Nov 02 2020

An operator in Atlantic Canada reduced their reservoir simulation run times by up to 30x by using ECHELON on a desktop equipped with a low-cost graphic card.

By the numbers
0 M
cells
0 x
faster
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desktop GPU
Stone Ridge Technology – ECHELON Advantages

Challenge

Average simulation run times during history match or production forecasting for models with 1-2 million active cells range from 9 to 11 hours on 4 cores using a CPU-based simulator. These long run times cause delays in achieving a fair history matched model which consequently creates uncertainty in the production forecasting. Although simulation run times could be reduced by increasing the number of cores in both legacy and more modern CPU simulators, this would increase costs and imply moving to a higher-end workstation or a cluster. These challenges motivated the operator to look for newer innovations such as a GPU based desktop simulator that promises faster run times with a smaller hardware footprint.

Results – Stone Ridge Technology
Solution – Stone Ridge Technology
Figure 1. The NVIDIA GTX-1080 GPU

Solution

ECHELON software is a massively parallel fully implicit reservoir simulator built from the ground up to operate on GPUs, enabling exceptional speed. A comparison between a CPU-based black oil simulator and ECHELON, using a single desktop GTX-1080 GPU, can been seen in the results table below.

Results

ECHELON software reduced all run times to 22-44 minutes while maintaining the accuracy of the original results; allowing the operator to dramatically increase efficiency with a minimal investment in new hardware.

Results – Stone Ridge Technology

The results in this case study were presented at the SPE Virtual Norway Subsurface Conference on November 2, 2020 and published as SPE 200748 paper.

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