| Abstract |
The reliability, risk assessment and mitigation of any project depends on three key pillars: data availability, team expertise and tools used to perform the study. The geothermal industry has widely adopted different software to support the exploration, assessment and exploitation of geothermal resources. However, the tools adopted by engineering companies, consultants and operators have varying levels of complexity, performance, adequateness and cost. Simplistic but versatile thermohydraulic simulators, dedicated geomodeling tools and data visualization engines and ad-hoc geophysical processing codes, often developed as a research effort from different vendors are combined and used by different stakeholders in a project. This results in miscommunication between project team members, possible data loss and simplifications enforced by the workflow or software limitations. On the other hand, the oil and gas industry has pushed the general trend towards the integration of all possible data in one software platform to create comprehensive and highly detailed models without a need for any simplification. To accomplish this, development of integrated software platforms, in which users of different expertise domains work with common datasets and carry out multidisciplinary workflows on a single model, has been realized. These software platforms significantly increase the performance of a project from data analysis through seismic and petrophysical interpretations, geomodeling, well planning, hydrothermal and geomechanical simulations for project sustainability assessment, performance optimization, risk assessment and mitigation. We introduce a next step in evolution of integrated modeling practices, which is the movement away from desktop system to a cloud-based infrastructure solution. This arrangement has been developed to facilitate the adoption of modeling tools by removing the need for software licensing, installation and maintenance and to reduce the cost and need of continuous update of user IT infrastructure by providing a common highly secured data storage and flexible (theoretically unlimited) access to computing power. The DELFI cognitive E&P environment makes applications and workflows accessible to all users and enables team members to build common workspaces for data, models and interpretations while respecting proprietary information boundaries. Each user has a dedicated workspace with access to the latest versions of all applications needed to perform the current tasks. Common data storage and computing power provide flexibility and scalability when they are needed, virtually unlimited computing power with no constraints on local infrastructure. Examples of how the proposed solution is used for on-demand reservoir simulation will be shown, applied to the performance assessment and the related uncertainty analysis of geothermal projects in the area of Munich (Germany). |