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26 Oct 2012

Date: Friday, November 2, 2012

Speaker: Margot Gerritsen, Associate Professor of Energy Resources and Engineering &
Director of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford
University

Location: Maxwell-Dworkin G125, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm. Talk, 1:00pm.

Title: A Computational Engineer Combusts

Abstract: Large-scale production of very heavy oil is gaining momentum. Unfortunately,
production of such reservoirs typically leads to large environmental impacts. One
promising technique that may mitigate these impacts is in-situ combustion (ISC). In this
process, (enriched) air is injected into the reservoir. After ignition a combustion front
develops in situ that burns a small percentage of the oil in place and slowly moves
through the reservoir producing steam along the way. The steam moves ahead of the front,
heats up the oil, makes it runnier and hence easier to produce. A side benefit of this
process is that the heat thus generated often cracks the oil into heavy, undesirable
components that stay behind in the reservoir and lighter, more valuable components that
can be brought up to the surface. In the last few years, my colleagues and I plunged into
heavy oil recovery to see if computational mathematics could make a difference in pushing
this process over less environmentally friendly processes in the industry. ISC processes
are notoriously hard to predict. We developed a workflow involving laboratory experiments,
various simulation tools and upscaling methods that increases the confidence of the oil
reservoir engineer in ISC. We hope that this will lead to a wider acceptance and use of
this technique.

Bio: Margot Gerritsen is a professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering at
Stanford and director of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering
(icme.stanford.edu<http://icme.stanford.edu/>)/>). Her work is about understanding and
simulating complicated fluid flow problems. Gerritsen's research focuses on the
design of highly accurate and efficient parallel computational methods to predict the
performance of enhanced oil recovery methods, with particular attention to gas injection
and in-situ combustion processes. These recovery methods are extremely challenging to
simulate because of the very strong nonlinearities in the governing equations. Outside
petroleum engineering, she is active in coastal ocean simulation with colleagues from the
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, yacht research and pterosaur flight
mechanics with colleagues from the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering,
and the design of search algorithms in collaboration with the Library of Congress and
colleagues from the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering.

For information about the future events at IACS, see http://iacs.seas.harvard.edu/events.

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[Aspuru-Guzik group list] [IACS-events] IACS Seminar Friday, November 2: Margot Gerritsen (Stanford University) on A Computational Engineer Combusts