Case Studies
Northern Territory, Australia - February 2003
Figure 1: Rock porosity in the Palm
Valley Gas Reservoir. The data is input to the reservoir simulation.
A Busy Engineer
Larry Franks works for Magellan Petroleum in Australia. He manages petroleum
production operations and also does hands-on engineering for drilling
and exploration operations. His job includes the design and drilling of
the exploration wells, gas reserves analysis, facility design, and product
sales. In short he performs a wide variety of jobs focused on the upstream
petroleum industry (drilling and production of oil and gas versus refining
it into petrol and other products).
The Reservoir
The Palm Valley gas field is located approximately 120 kilometers west
of Alice Springs in Australia's Northern Territory. The field has been
in production since 1983, providing gas for electricity in the towns of
Darwin and Alice Springs
Palm Valley produced 6.4 Bcf (billion cubic feet) of gas in 2002, and
the same amount in 2001. Compression is used to counteract the natural
decline, maintaining the production level.
The Reservoir Simulation
Using a finite-difference petroleum reservoir model called TETRAD, Larry
quantifies gas reserves in the reservoir and predicts future gas and water
production.
Surface geology studies and seismic data create the three-dimensional
shape of the reservoir — consisting of 50,000 grid blocks in the simulation.
Input variables for the model include the latest production data, as well
as subsurface geologic data gathered from ten wells drilled into the reservoir.
Three to four hundred time segments are ran producing hundreds of pages
of data. "It is impossible to understand the data unless it is in graphical
form," Larry added.
Tecplot
Tecplot is used to display the geological data, as well as the simulation
results. Larry wrote a QuickBasic program converting the input and output
data from the simulator to Tecplot.
"For every layer we include data for each geologic property, like porosity.
With this much detail it is difficult to form an image of the reservoir
without 3-D plots. The images from Tecplot provide an instant picture
of the whole reservoir and its features — which is extremely informative,"
said Larry "Tecplot was straightforward — the features I needed were covered
in the manuals. I was impressed that Tecplot animates simulator data with
hundreds of time segments and runs them like a video."
 Figure
2: Regional surface plot in the Palm Valley. This region
is called Pacoota. Rocks are usually divided into units based on geologic
age and named by the geologists that first define the rocks.
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