Offshore staff

DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia – Saudi Aramco has unveiled its first in-house basin simulator, designed to track migration of Saudi Arabia’s oil over time and assist efforts to discover new hydrocarbon deposits.

Aramco’s TeraPOWERS Technology Team (TPT), part of the EXPEC Advanced Research Center, presented the basin simulator recently during workshops at the Upstream Professional Development Center.

The new facility will be used to simulate the geologic evolution of the Arabian sedimentary basin at what Aramco calls an unprecedented level of detail.

The technology is unique, the company adds, because it can handle the vast models required to simulate the petroleum systems of the Arabian Peninsula.

It also allows integration of geological information from reservoirs with what is claimed to be an unprecedented resolution.

Ali A. Al-Meshari, EXPEC ARC manager, said the technology would “simulate the entire basin, providing Saudi Aramco an even more powerful engine to explore for hydrocarbons with even greater accuracy and more efficiency.”

The facility factors geologic, geochemical, and geophysical data into a simulation to determine when and where oil and gas were formed over a period of more than 500 million years.

Its special features included the ability to calculate prospect “charge risk.”

In addition, Aramco plans to add a Hybrid Darcy migration system, designed to generate migration pathways for hydrocarbons over millions of years more accurately, thereby allowing its exploration teams to drill for potential trapped hydrocarbons along the migration pathways for additional reserves.

Future phases will include additional graphical software such as Petrel workflows and Lithology and Kinetic Editors, which provide graphical tools to prepare and input data available in the company database easily, and the capability to graphically input and edit erosion and kinetic data.

10/05/2017