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DOE - Fossil Energy Techline - Issued on: November 4, 1996 DOE Offering Oil Producers Improved Reservoir Management SoftwareNew Version of "BOAST" Oilfield Simulation ProgramTulsa, OK - The Department of Energy's petroleum field office is making available to oil producers BOAST 3, a new version of its three-dimensional, three-phase "Black Oil Applied Simulation Tool." The new upgrade greatly enhances the speed at which the complex flow patterns of oil, gas and other fluids in a reservoir can be calculated. It also adds new graphical options to improve the user's ability to plot the paths these fluids would be expected to take through a reservoir. The software was developed by DOE's Bartlesville (OK) Project Office, the Federal government's lead field center for petroleum research and development. (Note: DOE recently announced that the Bartlesville office will be relocated to Tulsa, OK, within the next six months.) BOAST 3 is an improved version of BOAST II, which was first released in 1987 as a mainframe simulator and upgraded to a personal computer version in 1989. The personal computer version has had particular appeal to many independent producers. The most recent upgrade was developed by Louisiana State University in a joint project with the Energy Department to improve oil and gas reservoir characterizations in the Gulf of Mexico. BOAST can be used in a number of ways. It can help determine how much oil is likely to be recovered from primary production, and it can assist an operator in deciding how best to inject water or gas for pressure maintenance. It can also aid in evaluating secondary recovery processes and can simulate such recovery mechanisms as displacement, fluid expansion and gravity drainage. The new upgrade incorporates essentially the same features as its forerunner, however the code has been streamlined to run more efficiently. Compiled with MS Power Station FORTRAN, BOAST 3 is fully compatible with the WindowsTM operating systems, runs many times faster than BOAST II, and has a number of new features. The most important of these are two new post processors, COLORGRID and B3PLOT, that allow the user to immediately see the results of the simulation run graphically instead of sifting through stacks of output listings. With COLORGRID, input and output data can be displayed in plan or elevation view on a twelve-color, finite-difference grid. An annotation option allows the value of the data element to be displayed in each gridblock. With a time-step display option, the user can move through an animated sequence of simulation results and visually observe the behavior of the reservoir model. B3PLOT is a graphics package that allows plotting of production, saturation and other data vs. time, using either of two modes. In the simulation mode, as many as five data outputs can be plotted simultaneously. Field average values as well as values from specific well locations can be plotted, and the results can be compared to results from other simulation runs. In the history-match mode, historical data including oil, water, and gas production, gas-oil and water-oil ratios, and pressure is provided as a data file and matched to simulation results. Other options allow the user to specify a dip angle when initializing gridblock depths as opposed to individually specifying the depth of each gridblock, and wells can be specified as horizontal in the x or y direction to facilitate modeling of horizontal well behavior. The new software will be added to more than a dozen DOE reservoir management computer programs available to the public through the Bartlesville Project Office. These programs are widely used by petroleum industry companies in oil field operations, in academia for research and teaching, and by governmental agencies for analyses of economic, legislative and environmental issues. BOAST 3 is available electronically from the Bartlesville Project Office Internet Home Page: at the URL: http://www.npto.doe.gov. Copies are also available on diskette with printed manuals. For a copy of BOAST 3 and the User's Guide, or other DOE software, visit the Bartlesville Home Page, or contact: Herb Tiedemann -End of TechLine - |