Tempest 8.1 provides new means of representing flow behaviour in fractured wells (illustration: Emerson Automation Solutions)

Emerson Automation Solutions and its Stavanger-based Roxar business has launched the latest version of its reservoir management software suite – Roxar Tempest™ 8.1, designed to provide robust and efficient numerical solutions to support reservoir engineers in maximising field recovery.

The release complements and enhances the advanced uncertainty analysis delivered by Ensemble Smoother Based History Matching, previously introduced in the Tempest 8.0 release, and provides new means of representing flow behavior in the vicinity of fractures. The Roxar Software Solution portfolio also now offers a complete seismic to simulation package runnable in Big Loop™ workflows for advanced decision support.

“Risk mitigation, decision support and workflow integration are at the heart of Roxar Tempest. Our latest version develops these even further,” says Kjetil Fagervik, vice president of product development of Roxar Software at Emerson Automation Solutions.

He continues, “Tempest 8.1 brings reservoir engineers more tools to maximise the potential of their fields as well as enhanced field productivity thanks to greater simulation performance, improved uncertainty analysis, and a truly integrated workflow from geosciences to production. The result will be consistent reservoir understanding for a greater profitability across all field lifecycle stages.”

The new fractured well feature in the reservoir simulation module Tempest MORE within Tempest 8.1 handles the physics of the fracture-to-well connection and the multiphase flow within the fracture. The ability to do this for hundreds of wells in large full-field studies with practical run times is truly unique. Setting up fracture details is user friendly and analysing the results is straightforward, through both the flow rates that can be reported for individual fractures and pressures and/or flows that can be mapped over the fractures. High quality results visualisation and plotting capabilities offer a quick and clear understanding of the fracturing effect.

Other simulation-related enhancements include brine tracking to follow the salinity of the water and model its effects throughout the simulation. In addition, in order to handle multiple independent reservoirs involving fluids displaying different thermodynamic properties within the same simulation model, multiple ‘equation of state’ regions are now supported.

Finally, Tempest 8.1 comes with advanced uncertainty analysis tools delivered through Tempest ENABLE, Emerson’s uncertainty management and history matching module. This includes new upgrades to the Roxar App Connector, such as Nexus and Petrel* components; the capacity to submit runs from a Windows workstation to a Linux cluster; and new advanced uncertainty analysis tools delivered through Tempest’s Ensemble Smoother based History Matching. Additional enhancements include user capabilities to update Roxar RMS surface files and reduce memory usage.

The Ensemble Smoother is a complementary technique to proxy-based history matching which enables conditioning on all types of data to ensure that all uncertainties are comprehensively accounted for. The result is a complete seismic to simulation package runnable in the Roxar Big LoopTM workflow, an automated workflow that tightly integrates static and dynamic domains throughout the field’s lifetime and ensures optimal consistency of the reservoir properties with the underlying geology. Roxar Tempest, which runs on Windows and Linux and operates alongside Emerson’s reservoir characterisation and modelling solution Roxar RMS, is an integrated software suite that provides a single, consistent interface and is used in hundreds of installations worldwide.

Tags: Emerson Automation Solutions, Roxar