The American University of Beirut has received a reservoir simulation software valued at $1.7 million.
The software allows engineers to model oil and gas fields and reservoirs on their computers in order to predict the flow of oil or gas through layers of porous rock, which in turn, can help researchers identify the locations with the highest oil and gas availability and how to recover them.
The applications, known as ECLIPSE and Petrel, were donated by Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS), an operating unit of Schlumberger, which owns the software.
The software will allow students and researchers of the university to develop hands-on experience at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture and support skills development fo future oil and gas professionals in Lebanon.
The donation was originally created in support of a multi-disciplinary research project led by professors George Saad from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Fouad Azizi from the Chemical Engineering Program at AUB.
The research project, conducted by professors Saad and Azizi, is entitled “Stochastic Optimization of the Water Flooding Process through Front Tracking” and is partially supported by a grant from the Munib and Angela Masri Institute of Energy and Natural Resources at AUB. This project aims at proposing new techniques to substantially enhance oil production from oilfields. This would be achieved by injecting water into the reservoir in order to sweep large volumes of oil trapped in geological constrictions. The trapped oil would have been impossible to recover using traditional techniques.
Saad and Azizi’s research project aims at identifying the optimal location for injecting water into the reservoirs as well as the best site for drilling oil production wells. While the results of the study can be applied to any oilfield in the world, the study was conducted with the Lebanon’s reserves in mind.
To facilitate the usage of the donated software by the AUB community, Professor Makram Suidan, dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, has supplied faculty labs with five high performance computers.
“We thank Schlumberger for their donation and for their role in enriching engineering graduates’ skills and for contributing to increasing their competitiveness on a global scale and permitting them to work on challenging and relevant problems to the region,” said Dean Suidan.
