​Abstract: Building or refining a reservoir model – regardless if it represents a a hydrocarbon reservoir, a CO2 storage site or a geothermal system – is often a challenging and time-consuming task. While modern geomodelling tools enable us to build reservoir models that contain many millions of grid blocks, they generally do not allow us to rapidly prototype and explore different geological concepts, or quickly test how different geological concepts could impact flow and transport processes and subsequent engineering solutions. Instead, modern software tools tend to remove the geologist's intuition, encourage us to lock in geological concepts early, and often underestimate geological uncertainty, resulting in models that are precisely wrong and not approximately right.

This talk will present an alternative modelling and simulation approach termed Rapid Reservoir Modelling (RRM). RRM allows geologists and reservoir engineers alike to rapidly prototype new reservoir models. In RRM, geometries that describe geologic heterogeneities (e.g. faults, stratigraphic, sedimentologic and/or diagenetic features) are modelled as discrete volumes bounded by surfaces, without reference to a predefined grid. These surfaces are created and modified using intuitive, interactive techniques from computer visualization, namely Sketch Based Interfaces and Modelling (SBIM). Input data can be sourced from seismic images, outcrop analogues, conceptual model libraries, existing reservoir models, or a blank screen. The presentation will demonstrate the RRM approach using some real-life examples and, most importantly, answer the long-standing question "what have a bouncing basketball and a dancing gorilla to do with geology"?

Bio:  I joined the Institute of Petroleum Engineering (IPE) in 2006 as a lecturer. I was promoted to senior lecturer in 2009 and as full professor in 2010. In 2017 I became the Director of IPE. Before joining IPE, I was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich from 2004 to 2006.