Department of Earth Sciences students are using state-of-the-art software thanks to a US$6.2 million donation from Roxar Software Solutions.
The Houston-based company, a leading international technology solutions provider to the upstream oil and gas industry, provided an entire suite of reservoir modeling software for the department.
Burns Cheadle, Bell Chair in Petroleum Geology at Western, and Rob Chelak, Roxar Inc. Services Manager in the United States, shows off part of the new US$6.5 million suite of reservoir modeling software for the department.
With its head offices in Stavanger, Norway, Roxar employs more than 850 staff and has 28 offices in 19 countries, with an international customer base including all of the multinationals, major independents and the majority of national oil companies.
Burns Cheadle, Bell Chair in Petroleum Geology at Western, says the software will be used for teaching and research purposes. He and Rob Chelak, Roxar Inc. Services Manager in the United States, worked together at Imperial Oil in Calgary during the 1980s.
This particular donation of software came about as a result of a conversation he and Chelak had at the GeoCanada 2010 Convention in Calgary in May.
“I was bringing Rob up to speed with the fledgling Petroleum Geology program I initiated since I joined the Department of Earth Sciences in September 2009 and mentioned my desire to assemble a suite of software that would allow my students to gain experience using exactly the same tools that are currently used in the upstream oil and gas industry,” says Cheadle.
“Rob expressed a strong desire to work with me to provide his product in my laboratory and offered an extremely generous donation-in-kind of five concurrent licenses of the complete RMS 2010 reservoir modeling suite.”
Cheadle adds students are going to benefit tremendously from this latest addition to the department, allowing geoscientists to bring together a wide range of different data types and visualize subsurface geological strata in three dimensions.
“3-D visualization is absolutely essential for geologists to properly analyze and describe the spatial distribution of rock attributes such as rock types, thickness, extent, porosity, and so forth,” he says, adding until recently, most geologists were limited to describing these geometrical relationships in two dimensional maps and cross-sections, requiring an approximation what may be happening in the third dimension.
“With the advent of modern computer workstations and the evolution of software products such as RMS, it is no longer necessary to make that approximation. Not only is this 3-D visualization capability essential for proper analysis, but it also affords a ready means for communication of interpreted results.”
The Roxar donation is one of several software donations that have been made in support of the new Petroleum Geology program during the past year, says Cheadle, all of which underscore the benefit of developing and maintaining a constructive relationship between academia and industry.
“This is a clear example of a win-win situation,” he says. “Roxar is able to expose future industry clients to their product, while Western’s Earth Science students are able to use a state-of-the-art software product to develop better geological models for a wide variety of applications requiring precise and accurate description of subsurface properties.”