On September 14, 2015 Alf Birger Rustad announced on the
mailinglist
of the "Open Porous Media Initiative" (OPM) that several data sets describing
test and real world oil reservoirs are now available to the public under the
Open Database License.
This is a novel approach in the oil industry that usually is known for
its secretiveness in this and other regards.
Consequences of the Open Database License
The data is free as in freedom. This license grants you many rights but you are not allowed to trim these rights for other people even if you change the database. More information can be found in the summary of the license.
Data Sets Available in the 2015.10 Release of OPM
For a more current list of data sets see the OPM web page.
All the models are available as Eclipse input data. OPM has made every effort to be able to parse this format and run the corresponding simulations.
The Norne Oil Field
The most prominent data set is the Norne oil field. Before it's release as open data the Norne field data was only available as a benchmark case to universities for research and education purposes. It was hosted at the iOCenter of NTNU.
The oil field was discovered in 1991 and brought into production by Statoil in 1997. While the initial plan was to shut it down in 2014 production might continue until 2030 as announced by Statoil in 2015. As of 2010 there were 50 drilled wells, 16 active ones, 10 water injectors (8 active), and 7 observation wells. For more information about the field see the iOCenter of NTNU.
The data set contains data to simulate 3312 days of oil recovery with real reservoir data. It should serve as a key benchmark for the petroleum industry. It is and will be used to evaluate mathematical methods and their software implementation.
Synthetic Benchmark Cases
The following synthetic standard benchmark cases are included in opm-data:
- SPE1 Test case: A three-phase black oil reservoir, resolved by a 10x10x3 structured grid, depleted for 3650 days using gas injection with two wells.
- SPE3 Test case: A small case requiring the vaporized oil feature (live gas).
- SPE9 Test case: A three-phase black oil reservoir, resolved by a 24x25x15 structured grid, depleted for 900 days by water flooding with 26 wells
- SPE10 Test cases: Two more complicated benchmark cases on Cartesian meshes as described in the SPE Comparative Solution Project. The larger one has 60x220x85 cells.
While these have been available previously it was unclear under what license that was the case and how to obtain them. Therefore this seems to be the first case that they are bundled together, have an official license attached to them, and are openly available.
