The Big Loop: an Innovative Solution for Automating Subsurface Workflows and Transforming Inter-Disciplinary Asset Team Collaboration

Summary The efficient management of subsurface operations depends on the asset team’s technical excellence. Skilled practitioners in various domains interpret, model and predict reservoir performance. This, however, leads to silos between domains, each with its own language, methods and technologies, resulting in: a) An overly long cycle time for passing through domains, analyzing data and delivering key information that helps management decisions. b) The challenge of creating consistency between specialists and building confidence in the results. This presentation demonstrates a workflow that improves collaboration by helping practitioners work synchronously, based on fully automated reservoir modeling technologies allied with agile collaborative methods. The technology driver is a workflow orchestrator, which runs atop optimized reservoir modeling and simulation software packages and scripts. A cognitive approach is used: initial models are built from available data, and then refined iteratively as new information arrives. Updates are automatically propagated through domains and deliver new results. Consistency across domains is preserved and models are evergreen. Continuous alignment is guaranteed, and results reflect the asset’s needs. This solution, called Big Loop™, is software-agnostic, customizable to the needs of the individual organization, and has been shown to significantly improve asset development and management efficiency.