Oil & Gas
Characterization and modeling of naturally fractured (NFR) reservoirs
Stereonet and rose-diagram of fracture orientations.
- Development of a geostatistical approach for the data integration problem of modeling naturally fractured reservoirs from various fracturing, structural, seismic, geomechanical, geological, logs and dynamic data. Application to several (6) fields.
- Research, design and development of libraries and APIs dedicated to NFR data analysis and modeling.
- Interactive and automatic statistical classification of fractures.
- Parameter estimation of probability distribution functions of fracture orientation.
- Calculation of along-well fracture densities (FD) on a directional fracture-set basis.
- Statistical analysis of along well scale-dependent fracture densities (SiZer-like approach).
- Geostatistical simulation of FD.
- Analytical method for calculating interlayer fracture permeabilities accounting for persistent and bedding-terminated fractures.
- Generation of spatially periodic fracture systems for calculating observation scale-dependent equivalent/effective within-layer permeability tensors and other flow properties (block sizes, shape factor).
- Flow-based evaluation of interpreted well-test permeabilities on reservoir models (permeability-tensor fields).
- Sensitivity analysis to relate static model parameters to equivalent/effective flow properties.
- Automatic calibration (inversion) of NFR model to condition equivalent/effective permeability-tensor fields to dynamic data.
Effective permeability tensors relying on spatially periodic fracture systems.
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- Characterization and modeling of fracture swarms and corridors: research, design and development of statistical analysis tools for characterizing scale-dependent fracture densities (FD) and statistically recognizing fracture swarms. Geostatistical simulation of probability density functions of fine-scale FD.
- Design and development of a plugin and workflow in Gocad for modeling naturally fractured reservoir (GoFraK). Implementation of all previous libraries to make them easily available in a geological modeling software.
- Technical support on geostatistical modeling of fracture densities for commercial software developments.
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Petroleum geostatistics
Maximum horizontal permeability direction and value derived from geostatistically simulated fracture densities. 
Conditioning of permeability tensor fields to well-test data.
- Design and development of geostatistical modules (estimation, simulation) within an integrated geostatistical software for reservoir characterization and modeling.
- Petroleum reservoir modeling for flow simulation studies.
- Assessment of infill drilling potential and connected pore volumes for enhancing production in petroleum reservoirs.
- Exploitation of 3D-seismic data to optimize the number and location of exploration wells in a bitumen field.
- Integration of 3D seismic attributes to assist with selection of horizontal drilling locations for development drilling.
- Elaboration and realization of an interactive methodological guide for probabilistic assessment of in place hydrocarbon resources.
- Calculation of metric curvilinear coordinate systems for better capturing the spatial continuity of reservoir properties.
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Grid generation and upscaling
Grid/mesh generation and optimization.
- Research work on adaptive gridding algorithms for different types of reservoir simulators and gridding optimization objectives.
- Development of 3DDEGA, a three-dimensional adaptive gridding software able to recognize and capture reservoir heterogeneities and flow paths, and to compute effective properties of heterogeneous adapted grid-blocks. Assistance for its use.
- Design and development of several mesh generation and optimization programs for reservoir simulation.
- Automatic generation of anisotropic tetrahedral meshes embedded in hexahedral grids (constrained Delaunay and Voronoi meshes) for modeling complex wells.
- Generation and optimization of 2D anisotropic triangular meshes for simulating multiphase flows in highly fractured media.
- Three-dimensional flexible mesh optimization taking into account well layouts and reservoir discontinuities.
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- Technical support on automatic and adaptive gridding for commercial software developments.
- European Thermie project for the demonstration of adaptive gridding on actual reservoir data sets. Two-year project in collaboration with the Paris School of Mines (F) and SMC Ltd (UK). Data-sets provided by Agip, Elf Aquitaine, Norsk Hydro and Total. Three reservoir simulators used: Eclipse, VIP, Genesys.