Petex User Meeting

I am attending the Petroleum Experts User Meeting in Edinburgh.  Edinburgh is such a great city, very historic but comfortable with friendly people and many great sights.  

This is an annual event put on by Petroleum Experts, the dominant provider of software for well and integrated system modeling for the oil and gas industry.  I have used Petex software since the early 1990s and for several years taught PROSPER, the well modeling software.  My last 5 years with Shell was full time promoting and managing this software suite globally for Shell.

It was great to see lots of former colleagues and friends.

Left to right: Burney, Mark Deere, Abraham Ekebafe, Hamid Guedroudj, Leigh Fry, Harry Sommerdijk,  Thankgod Egbe,  Umoh Magdalene Mussah, Khatan Ansari, Mike Pincock, Fidelis Tendo

If you think you know about the IPM suite and the state of the art of integrated modeling in the industry, you might want to keep watching what Petroleum Experts are doing.  There have been many improvements lately and they just keep getting better.  This year they have included in the next release major improvements in how they model CO2, salts, beam-pump wells, and coal-bed methane wells.  Several of the packages are getting major improvements in the interface.  Soon you will be able to make a forecast and for every point in the forecast see a pressure gradient.  RESOLVE, which orchestrates several packages within the suite and also third-party software into a common model, has always had scripting required to do interesting things.  RESOLVE now has visual workflow creation, which looks much less intimidating than a screen full of programming code.  Even more radical is that RESOLVE will be able to build models made up of small parts of the IPM applications and will be able to use objects the user creates out of these small parts in multiple models.  This is the equivalent of re-usable code modules but made out of applications.  So, a system can be made which calculates a forecast where at every time step a minimum fluid level in each well is calculated and pump speed adjusted.  Or, a system can be made that looks uses a mixed-integer optimizer to find the best of multiple development option combinations based on full-field lifecycle economics.  Taken to its logical conclusion, the system could be used to create any oilfield software product that has as its core an overlap with what IPM does.


Finally, Petroleum Experts has bought NSI, a company that specializes in visualizing real-time data.  Their previous product, OFC, is now called IVM and will link to IFM to help quickly create visualizations of the massive amounts of data that come from the oilfield after that data has been filtered and manipulated through engineering software.  


The capability of the larger suite is already being demonstrated, and the potential of linking and reusing modules both in project development and in brownfield operating environments is huge and growing.