The CompGeo (Computational Geoscience) department is a largely industry funded research department solving fundamental research questions in geoscience using numerical analysis. We employ Postdoctoral fellows, PhD and Master's students in Computational Geoscience with a variety of backgrounds: geophysics, geology, applied mathematics, scientific computing and physics. By developing innovative geoscience models and deploying them on basic research questions that are of keen interest to both industry and academia, Computational Geoscience will be a recognised name in the geodynamics community and influence the way the oil and gas industry conduct exploration.
—Better models, better constraints, excellent geoscience
Research
Our research is closely tied to basic research questions that interest our industry partner, Statoil and often in combination with software development by Simula's subsidary, Kalkulo. Our research covers two broad areas of interest:
- Geodynamic Modelling and Basin Dynamics. The department conducts research into geodynamic problems and basin dynamic problems using sophisticated parallel computing codes and numerical techniques. The research is aimed understanding plate driving forces, mantle convection, mantle-induced vertical basin movements as well as modelling the sedimentary processes forming basins.
- Impact of Scientific Computing in the Petroleum Industry. High performance computing is becoming available on a laptop, but the development of industry applications hasn't always kept pace with the rapid increases in computing speed and new computing capabilities, like GPU computing. Our group develop algorithms and methods that are innovative, run efficiently and make use of the advances in computational software and hardware. Another development in scientific computing is uncertainty reduction and quantification through stochastic and inverse methods. We seek to make these methods available to the Industry.
Our Motivation
The Norwegian oil and gas industry spends millions of dollars on exploration: locating and measuring the potential of resources around the world. Computational methods, while heavily used in engineering tasks around producing resources, are only just making inroads into exploration research. Several limitations pose problems for computational methods in the industry: the high cost of data collection, the indirect nature of the data collected and the inability to observe system-evolution. Computational Geoscience can make its mark on industry by using computational methods to address the scarcity and indirect nature of the data, improve current models with innovative methods and demonstrate their effectiveness by applying them to scientific problems of both industrial and academic relevance.
Computational Geoscience at Simula: A brief history
Since 2005, Simula has had a close collaboration with Statoil, and formely Hydro, addressing computational problems related to oil and gas exploration. The great majority of fundamental research on geoscientific topics is funded by Statoil, partly through the Simula School of Research and Innovation's participation as an academic partner in Statoil's VISTA program, and partly through strategic research projects. These basic research activities are paired with the technology development conducted by Simula's commercial subsidiary, Kalkulo, under contracts with Statoil. In total, the Statoil funding of R&D activities at Simula in 2009 accounted for 12.5 MNOK. The research is conducted in close interaction with senior personnel at Statoil's research centers and in the business unit for global exploration.
