| Abstract |
Tremendous progress has been made in the last few years in reservoir modelling especially in the development of methodologies to better visualize reservoir models and in development of software that go with it. Be they simple analytical models or complex grid numerical models, all reservoir models are expected to provide vital resource information and to have the capacity to be queried to reveal more than is obvious to the professionals using them. Quite often they are expected to delineate resources and offer inferences that usually have a bearing on present and future development plans. These models are known to raise great debate among professional geothermists, developers, government and even financiers who are critical stakeholders in geothermal resource development. Reservoir models are therefore extremely useful as a strategic tool as well as a resource management tool. Rarely does all the professionals developing the resource present their datasets in the same formats. Each discipline commonly has its own set of analysis software that is separate from the other. Ironically, the stakeholders in development of the resource always need a singular unified understanding of resource potential, characteristics and performance. In the last decade, a great deal of progress was made in unifying the different datasets and in interpreting them into a singular integrated model. The need therefore arose to visualize these datasets together and offer informative images of the reservoirs that are in a sense all-inclusive but at the same time simplified to make sense to all stakeholders. This involved development of new software with the ability to combine all the different datasets into a singular model and visualizing them all together in one space. These have led to ease of comprehension and insightful interpretation that are more acceptable among professional geothermists, developers, governments and financiers. In this paper we present a novel approach to better visualize 3D reservoir models both digitally and the emerging 3D printed models with superior visualization capability for reservoir characteristics and performance. |