Abstract:
As the oil and gas industry's ultimate goal is to uncover efficient
and economic ways to produce oil and gas, well optimization
studies are crucially important for reservoir engineers. Although
this task has a major impact on reservoir productivity, it has been
challenging for reservoir engineers to perform since it involves
time-consuming flow simulations to search a large solution space
for an optimal well plan. Our work aims to provide engineers a)
an analytical method to perform static connectivity analysis as a
proxy for flow simulation, b) an application to support well
optimization using our method and c) an immersive experience
that benefits engineers and supports their needs and preferences
when performing the design and assessment of well trajectories.
For the latter purpose, we explore our tool with three immersive
environments: a CAVE with a tracked gamepad; a HMD with a
tracked gamepad; and a HMD with a Leap Motion controller. This
paper describes our application and its techniques in each of the
different immersive environments. This paper also describes our
findings from an exploratory evaluation conducted with six
reservoir engineers, which provided insight into our application,
and allowed us to discuss the potential benefits of immersion for
the oil and gas domain.
Researchers: Roberta C. Ramos Mota, Stephen Cartwright, Ehud Sharlin, Hamidreza Hamdi, Mario Costa Sousa and Zhangxin Chen
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