Petro-Canada achieves high quality geological models with Isatis

Petro-Canada, an integrated oil and gas Canadian company and one of the largest integrated developers of Canada’s oil sands, recently used ISATIS in one of its most important projects, for high resolution 3D geological modelling of their oil sands mining property.

ISATIS handles huge data sets and models

Because their mining area is quite large and the geology complex, Petro-Canada was looking for a software solution that:
could handle models with tens of millions of cells,
had sophisticated modelling capabilities, specifically geostatistical routines.

Most importantly, Petro-Canada’s approach to geological modelling is to apply stochastic modelling to create a set of realizations that can be used for uncertainty evaluation. So they were looking for a solution that offers stochastic modelling and the power to apply it to very large data sets and models.

ISATIS proved to be the right solution.

ISATIS offers the market-leading technical capabilities

Oil sands mining equipement

Indeed, ISATIS meets Petro-Canada’s needs very well because it provides an unusually diverse set of geostatistical tools and modelling algorithms that cover everything from exploratory data analysis to 2D and 3D modelling as well as important post-processing tools to analyse and present the modelling results.

Using ISATIS, Petro-Canada intends to increase the sophistication of their modelling process by progressing into more powerful techniques as they gain a better understanding of their property through continuing drilling and data analysis.

ISATIS is a multi-platform solution

Petro-Canada benefits from the flexibility of being able to run the software on all major business computing platforms, taking advantage of all the positives of Unix, Linux, and Windows, according to their needs for the task at hand.

Not to mention the new 64-bit capacity of ISATIS and the implementation of the multithreading programming technique, which enabled Petro-Canada to complete a very large stochastic model within a tight time-frame.

ISATIS technical support, world-class in geostatistical and software proficiency

Oil sands

No software package is ever perfect, and continual development means that the software is ever changing, so technical support from the software development company is extremely important to address issues in a timely fashion and keep project work going on time.

Petro-Canada called GEOVARIANCES many times during this project to get help on specific issues or to require some slight improvements of the software.

For geostatistical expertise and timely delivery of software patches, Petro-Canada expressed a high degree of satisfaction with the support they received. In addition, they applauded the very knowledgeable help desk staff, who were diligent in getting answers quickly, and the world-class consulting personnel for their geostatistical and software proficiency.

No doubt that Petro-Canada will use ISATIS throughout the life of their project, continually updating the model as well as using it for detailed characterization studies. ISATIS will also be used to assist in the characterization of other oil sands or conventional oil and gas properties. The proof is they just acquired their second license.