A common problem with oil wells is that they can run dry even when sound-based measurements say there’s still oil there.
A common problem with oil wells is that they can run dry even when sound-based measurements say there’s still oil there. A team from Penn State University used PSC’s flagship Bridges-2 supercomputer to add a time dimension to these seismic measurements, as well as to analyze how oil damps down the loudness of sound traveling through it. Their preliminary analysis suggests that hidden rock structures in oil reserves prevent all the oil from being pumped out. They’re now scaling up their work to tackle realistically sized oil fields.
Why It's Important
Given all the complexity of finding oil in more remote and deeper locations, we need to drill smarter. Waste was always expensive, but today it’s particularly important to be as clean and efficient as oil and gas extraction can be.
Experts use the movement of sound through the Earth to spot where oil deposits should be. Those measurements also tell us the approximate size of a given reserve. Still, it’s common for a well to go dry after only a fraction of its suspected oil has been pumped out. Penn State’s Tieyuan Zhu and his students and postdoctoral fellows wanted to understand why that is — and to develop more accurate measurements of how much oil a given well will actually produce.
Read More: Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
Photo Credit: gui1303 via Pixabay
