Detailed technical advances: In addition to the changes discussed above, many

advances have been made over the past 50 years on how we perform the
simulations
i.e. on the formulation and numerical methods etc. Our practical capabilities have
also expanded greatly as discussed above. Table 1 presents a list of capabilities and
major technical advances in reservoir simulation over the last 50 years; this table
was adapted from two tables in J.W. Watts “Reservoir Simulation: Past, Present
and
Future”, SPE38441, SPE Reservoir Simulation Symposium, Dallas, TX, 5-7 June
1997. This article is well worth reading. Most of the technical details in the
advances
listed in Table 1 are beyond the scope of this course and the introductory student
does
not need to have any in-depth knowledge on these.

Organisational changes in the oil industry: A number of major organisational

changes have occurred in the oil industry since the 1970s which have affected the
practice of reservoir simulation. The main ones are as follows:
(a) Many companies have taken a more integrated
geophysics/geology/engineering
view of reservoir development and many studies have made a central virtue
of this by organising reservoir studies within more multi-disciplinary asset
teams (e.g. SPE25006 clearly shows a strong integration of geology and
engineering);
(b) There have been significant organisational changes in the structure of the
industry given the sucessive rounds of “downsizing” and “outsourcing”
that have occurred. For example, see the short article by Galas, “The future
of Reservoir Simulation”, JCPT, p.23, Vol. 36 (1), January 1997, which is
reproduced in Appendix B. This article has an interesting slant from the
point of view of the smaller consultant and it makes a number of interesting
observations;