Geir Evensen of NORCE research institute in Norway has been awarded the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate’s 16 th award for improved oil recovery, beating submissions from the Grane field in the North Sea and oil company Lundin.
Geir Evensen of NORCE research institute in Norway has been awarded the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate’s 16th award for improved oil recovery, beating submissions from the Grane field in the North Sea and oil company Lundin.
‘Evensen has made significant contributions over several years towards the development of modelling methods based on the ensemble approach. This technology is used extensively among the oil and gas companies on the Norwegian shelf,’ said the NPD.
Evensen invented the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) algorithm in 1994, which has been further developed by several international oil companies. In the 2000s, he led the work to implement this model at Equinor.
‘The method, which in Equinor is called FMU (Fast Model Update), is a workflow for reservoir modelling where we use a number of models in parallel to describe the reservoir’s uncertainty,’ Evensen said. ‘We can also quickly update the reservoir models based on observed data. This gives us a better description of the reservoir’s associated uncertainties, which is useful in the placement of wells and the development of drainage strategies.’
The jury, comprising seven representatives from different disciplines in the NPD, considered 24 nominations.
