ERC Tigress, Amoco, Cray & LANL Demonstrate New Generation Reservoir Simulator at SPE.

could see beneath the surface of the earth, its experts would know how to develop its fields most efficiently with the least amount of risk.

As risk is reduced, energy companies can slow gas price increases for consumers and reduce the nation's dependence on foreign energy sources.

A team of experts from ERC Tigress Inc. (a member of the PGS group), Amoco Corporation, the United States Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory and Cray Research Inc. are demonstrating their success in connecting a prototype of this reservoir simulator to massively parallel processing (MPP) equipment at speeds 20 times faster than existing technology at the Society of Petroleum Engineers Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition.

Field trials are underway on a model with five million grid cells. Reservoir simulators have been used for years on smaller computers, but they have been limited by smaller, less-detailed grids, smaller memory sizes and slower processing speeds. Modeling on MPP improves detailed representation of the reservoir, and its application in the industry will reduce risk.

As the newest member of the team, ERC Tigress brings the data management capabilities of its TIGRESS(TM) (The Integrated Geoscience and Reservoir Engineering Software System) database to the product, along with new 3-D visualization on both the input and output sides of the simulator. Code-named Falcon, the simulator is expected to be released by mid-1996.

"ERC Tigress will market the product, under a nonexclusive licensing agreement with Amoco, as part of the suite of applications available for use with our project database," said R. Wayne Carpenter, president of ERC Tigress. "Although designed for the petroleum industry, variations of the technology could have broad applications in communications or environmental science," he said.

"ERC Tigress was selected for the project because of its willingness to apply its data management capabilities toward a seamless pathway for Amoco's reservoir simulator," said Dr. Robert E. Stephenson, Amoco senior petroleum engineering associate at the Amoco Tulsa Technology Center. Amoco, among other oil companies, is a licensee of TIGRESS.

"Amoco's proprietary simulator ranks among the fastest in the petroleum industry," Carpenter said. "Simulator speed, as well as the number-crunching ability of the computers on which it runs, is critical to generating timely answers to production predictions. The TIGRESS third-party interface allows an easy port of the proprietary software of any user to the TIGRESS project database."

The developers are using the Cray T3D system to develop the project, which will run on today's workstations, multiprocessors and PCs as well. Los Alamos National Laboratories brought expertise in developing linear solutions to this oil and gas recovery project.

"Modeling the entire field is a substantial improvement, because it means relying on fewer engineering assumptions," said Dr. Gautam Shiralkar, Amoco senior staff petroleum engineer. "The result is more precise information about resource recovery, so that we can make informed decisions about whether and where to drill wells and operate field production better."

"When completed, Falcon will be a general purpose simulator offering both compositional and black oil simulations," said Dr. J. Robert Gochnour, principal reservoir engineer for ERC Tigress. Black oil models are based on the pressure, volume and temperature relationships of simple fluids, whereas compositional models describe hydrocarbons fluids in terms of their molecular components. Both models operate via a series of complex mathematical equations.

The ability to extract one tenth of one percent more from a reservoir can be worth millions of dollars to the petroleum industry. "The result of these simulator developments optimize oil recovery from a field and lower costs for extracting oil," Stephenson said.

Massively parallel processing and multiprocessors involve several individual computers that simultaneously process parts of a program, then combine results for a faster solution to complex problems.

The project was developed under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Department of Energy for a grant of $3.5 million over three years. It is part of a far-reaching transfer agreement between Cray Research and the U.S. DOE for a $52 million cost-shared program to develop scientific and commercial software for MPP systems in collaboration with the DOE's Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and 15 leading U.S. industrial firms.

ERC Tigress Inc. provides petroleum software and consulting services for worldwide exploration and production. United with Petroleum Geo-Services A/S in July 1994, the firm's worldwide operations include offices in nine countries. Its Tigress(TM) is a client-server database featuring an open system architecture, with 2-D and 3-D seismic interpretations, mapping, modeling, petrophysics, petroleum and reservoir engineering and reservoir simulation applications. For more information, contact:

ERC Tigress Inc. 11200 Westheimer, Suite 200 Houston, TX 77042 713/953-0054 -0- Amoco Corporation is a worldwide petroleum and chemical company. -0- TRADEMARKS: Tigress is a registered trademark of ERC Tigress Inc.

CONTACT: ERC Tigress Inc., Dallas

Media: Paula Ruth, 713/780-4600

or

Amoco Corporation

Michelle McCalope, 713/366-4092