How can today’s resources fuel our shared tomorrow?

Permanent sensors placed in and around each well, located many thousands of feet below ground, deliver constant data streams and updates. These sensors, along with numerous other data acquisition methods, enable us to build high-resolution pictures of not only how the reservoir was formed, and what is happening in it today, but also how the conditions may change over the decades to come.

The models are dynamic, reacting and updating with new data and insights as they become available, or when new wells are drilled. The results equip our engineers with the fullest knowledge of how to optimize field development.

Detailed understanding of how a reservoir behaves also aids in deciding how to produce from each well. To maintain pressure and extract the oil from the rock, most reservoirs require water injection. However, if water enters a well it disrupts oil production. Our high-fidelity reservoir models, running on our in-house simulator, GigaPOWERS, capture the detailed fluid flow involved in active waterflooding schemes and enable us to design injection strategies. Such simulations reveal the rate of oil each well should produce, so that the water maintains reservoir pressure uniformly for optimal oil recovery rates.

This capability enabled the company to decrease oil-water separation. Our models also help to pinpoint the optimum position for surface production facilities such as water separation.

The decrease in separation costs, and the reduced need for this process, reduces power consumption, saving energy and, as a result, lowering emissions.

In addition, the technology is integral to our reserve calculations and production forecasts, which ensure we maintain the capability to respond to global demand changes.

The power behind the predictions

A unique challenge Aramco faced early on was modelling our enormous fields in their entirety. Our oil fields are among the largest in the world, so we had to create specialized technology in-house. As such, we were the first in the industry to develop a billion-cell reservoir simulation capability.

In 2010, we modelled the two largest oil fields on the planet for the first time: Ghawar, an onshore field which spans 174 miles in length and comprises numerous complex layers and reservoirs, and Safaniya, an offshore field which spans 31.1 miles.

Two types of power are necessary for such achievements: the brainpower of our talented scientists, and computing power. Sophisticated algorithms are the foundation of our technology, augmented by innovative visualization tools that turn our data into meaningful insights to help improve decision-making, as well as optimize our production and operations.

Then extreme computing power is required. Advances in computational power continue to push the boundaries of what's possible. In the past, it would take days to run a simulation—and it was only part of a reservoir. With today's computing power we run full-field simulations in hours. And soon, the 20 petaFLOPS processing power of Aramco's new Ghawar One supercomputer—one of the world's top 25 supercomputers, capable of 20 quadrillion (1015) calculations per second—will aid us in achieving even more ambitious milestones.

Effective carbon management is a priority for our company. A global team of scientists led by Stanford University—in their 2018 study—discovered that, among the countries producing more than 0.1% of global oil production, Saudi Arabia ranked the lowest in carbon intensity of any major producer in extracting, processing, and transporting its crude oil to the refinery gate.

What's next?

Advances in sensor technology and data acquisition are enabling us to gather richer data and build models with increasingly higher resolutions. This improved data, coupled with the leaps being made in computational power, will deliver simulations with more complexity and detail than ever before.

We continue to reveal new information, allowing us to predict hundreds of years into the future with a greater degree of accuracy. Considering these trends in data interpretation and reservoir visualization in connection to our goal of modelling the Saudi Arabian basin, the potential is staggering.