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Atomic meshing—A new technology for optimized field development and rapid prospect generation

Landmark Graphics Corporation, Houston, Texas, U.S.

Corresponding authors: npurday@lgc.com; mbenefiel@lgc.com

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Achieving the goals of rapid prospect generation and optimized field development is critical to successful competition in today's marketplace. One key workflow in achieving these goals is seismic interpretation to reservoir modeling and flow simulation. Using traditional approaches, each step in the workflow can be tedious and time consuming, requiring data format transformations that are prone to errors and inconsistencies. These barriers mean that many fields are managed without the proven benefits of either static or dynamic reservoir models.

What if you could quickly build a simulation-ready reservoir model directly from your seismic data or existing interpretation? That's the question that inspired Dave Hale to develop a new concept he called atomic meshing. Recalls Hale, "I wondered: why create all of these surfaces in the first place? Why not simply interpret seismic data using some type of space-filling grid that would also work for flow simulation?"

Atomic meshing technology provides a common data architecture and a new methodology for interpretation that produces a sealed structural framework for input to reservoir modeling and simulation. The atomic meshing approach can reduce cycle-time by eliminating the additional steps to create a sealed framework from horizon and fault surfaces. Additional benefits include improved consistency between the original interpretation and the reservoir simulation model by eliminating potential errors produced in the process of data architecture transformations.

An example of atomic meshing is illustrated in Figure 1 which shows a seismic interpretation (white lines), the atomic mesh (yellow polygons), and flow vectors (black lines, length proportional to magnitude). This image illustrates that a single atomic mesh can be used for both interpretation and simulation.

View larger version (212K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 1. An atomic mesh fitted to fault interpretation combined with fluid flow vectors. The simulation is based on a producer/injector pair placed in the upper left and lower right of the image. . . . [Full Text of this Article]