Better reservoir visualisation
Santos, a significant Australian energy company, sponsors open source software to improve 3D reservoir visualisation. The software, TurboVNC, allows users of standard laptops to connect to servers running Paradigm exploration and production software from any network location. Performance, collaboration and data management benefits are coupled with capital and operational savings of $2.5 million AUD. Santos’s TurboVNC project won the global Innovator of the Year award (2011) with Red Hat, suppliers of Linux, the server operating system. Beyond these immediate benefits, the real value of thin client application delivery is the ability to centralise data in one large database. This facilitates consistent data standards and quality procedures to be applied. New insights and value can be derived from the consolidated big data gathered from the full exploration and production spectrum. The hypothesis is that access to larger, integrated data sets can result in better reservoir models, reduced uncertainty and optimised production.