ROGTEC talks to Dmitry Eydinov, Director of Business Development, Rock Flow Dynamics
How long have you been doing business in the region?
The company was established in 2005 by a few enthusiastic people who wanted to change the existing paradigms of the reservoir simulations. After 5 years of struggling for survival, the company flagship software product tNavigator reached a level of superior quality tool. The simulator is currently employed in most of the Russian companies and actively expanding on the globe.
Do you have a specific target markets in the region? (ie Russia, Kazakstan, key regions or market sectors offshore, EOR etc?)
We work with petroleum and service companies wherever reservoir simulations take place. Our main activities are in Russia&CIS and Americas where we have offices (Moscow and Houston). In addition, RFD has strategic partners in all principal petroleum regions of the world. We aim to bring tNavigator to the world market leader position in the nearest future.
What are your key products for the region and their benefits?
Our reservoir simulator tNavigator is the first and only product on the market which dynamically combines a fully interactive 3D graphical user interface and a record breaking parallel supercomputing engine. Simulations in tNavigator are typically 10-100 faster than with the conventional solutions. As a result, tNavigator provides superior performance and user efficiency for reservoir engineers at the corporate reservoir simulation departments and in the fields.
Why is it so fast?
All major reservoir simulators are 20-30 years old. They simply cannot be computationally efficient on the modern hardware. When tNavigator development was started in 2005, we knew where the multicore-CPU was going to. The right decisions on the software platform building phase result in the exceptional performance at present.
What potential is there for your products in the market?
The main area for the growth is application to the field reservoir engineering challenges. Modern reservoir development has to utilize reservoir simulations – the most accurate way to predict the reservoir performance. However, most of the petroleum companies in our region do not use simulation models for real production problems, despite the models are built in the project institutes and corporate centers. When the model is finalized it often gets shelved and abandoned. At the same time, the geologist and reservoir engineers in the fields use simple oil-in-place 2D maps to make the decisions. The problem is that the regular simulators are not sufficiently user friendly and take months of trainings to get started. In order to apply reservoir simulation based on the models built in the centers, the specialists in the fields need to have efficient and user friendly tools. We developed the user interface with standardized-scenario solutions of typical production problems: waterflood optimization, sidetracking, fracturing and BHT, tracers, polymer injections, etc. tNavigator is able to control the model at runtime. Users can not only monitor every step of the reservoir simulation at runtime, but also, they can directly interrupt and change the simulation’s configurations with just a mouse click. So, reservoir engineers can change anything in the scheme design and instantly see the effect of the changes on the production indicators. We aim to expand this experience in the petroleum companies in Russia.
How do you compare and compete with existing Russian Technology?
Reservoir simulators contain a lot of complex science and are very difficult to make. Despite the great market demands, very few companies have actually succeed in building a healthy commercial product in this area. So, there are very few products in the world, not just in Russia. Our main competitors are major international service companies. As for the technologies in Russia, tNavigator is the only successful commercial simulator.
How do you see the market developing over the next 5 years in your industry sector?
The conceptual limitation for the reservoir models is the simulation time. With growing high-performance computer efficiency, the simulations are getting significantly faster. This leads to improvement in the models quality. Thus, the reservoir models should get widely applied to everyday field challenges, such as waterflood optimization, local production forecasting, workover planning etc. That will change it all, since the models will get follow-up from the fields, and become a vital part of the operational process.
Do you have any new products being launched?
Yes. We have just started implementation of geological modeling software. This will complement our product line, and give our users a uniform platform for the whole workcycle.
Do you have any recent regional success stories?
A great example is TNK-BP, where tNavigator is massively applied to optimize waterflooding and simulate production and workover actions in the West Siberian fields. We trained more than 100 geologists and reservoir engineers in the production units at the take-off. The results of the projects are fantastic: the workover efficiency was improved from 40 to 67%.
