What is EssRisk?

EssRisk is a software tool used by reservoir engineers to streamline their work and help them optimize field development and increase daily production. It’s an ideal cost reduction, field development, optimization and production enhancement solution

Why do engineers do reservoir simulation?

The purpose of reservoir simulation history matching is not to find a history match. Rather, simulation studies should be aimed at:

  • Understanding the reservoir asset value
  • Quantifies the uncertainty in those assets
  • Making optimal investment or divestment decisions

  • Making operational decisions (day to day operations, well designs and placement, workover strategies, EOR strategies)

How does EssRisk help?

EssRisk is a complete decision making tool for reservoir simulation. It maximises the productivity of the engineer, guides them to a robust set of solutions, and provides a valid, realistic uncertainty profile. It does this using a minimal set of simulation runs, without needing large computer clusters or many simulation licenses. It performs the following tasks:

  • Appraisal (or greenfield) uncertainty analysis
  • History matching and prediction uncertainty

  • Optimisation of a given geological model

  • Optimisation under uncertainty

Productivity

Studies have shown that history match studies with proxy-based tools can be completed in less than a third of the time compared with traditional manual approaches or less sophisticated tools. Moreover, rather than produce a single history match, a valid probabilistic ensemble of history matches is generated.

Why do you claim EssRisk is the first valid uncertainty tool?

EssRisk is the result of many decades of research, in both the oil industry and outside. The founders of EssencePS have a long history within this area. EssRisk is the first tool which uses valid Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques which have recently emerged from Bayesian probability research institutes, used in areas from social analysis to medical biostatistics. Previous tools used throughout the oil industry use techniques which generally underestimate uncertainty, and introduce bias in the forecasts.

Implementation

EssRisk takes advantage of emerging application product trends. It is high value/low cost, deployment is easy (it is 100% pure Java), and the user interface uses the latest approaches (for example JavaFX) designed for multiple platforms from desktops to mobile phones

Open philosophy

EssRisk is designed to work with other third party tools, and has its own growing internal library of functions or scripts that is open to all users.

It has proprietary internal pre and post processing languages. These are used to help manipulate the simulation deck and produce derived results (such as NPV). These are implemented and executed entirely within EssRisk, without recourse to external complex languages, facilitating ease of use.

In addition, EssRisk can interface to geomodelling tools, such as Petrel or RMS, to manipulate the geomodel directly and provide a fully integrated ‘big loop’ workflow. The founders of EssencePS were the first to implement this workflow for reservoir engineers.