Hydrocarbon Simulator Tutorial Series in Windows

Access Volve Dataset — Part I

Updated (April, 2021)

Roderick Perez
4 min readApr 1, 2021

Volve is a decommissioned field located in the central part of the North Sea, discovered in 1993. The development and operation plan (PDO) was approved in 2005 and was operational in 2008, and finally closed in 2016. Equinor and its partners decided to publish the most important subsurface data for the Volve field.

In this series of post, I will guide you in the process to download the dataset (Part I), download and set-up your access through Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer (Part II), as well as download the open-source reservoir visualization software, ResInsight, in order to visualize the reservoir modeling results (Part III).

Volve Field (Equinor) reservoir simulation (oil saturation) animation in ResInsight.

Introduction

The data set from the Volve field, located in the North Sea, corresponds to one of the most important milestones in modern history in the exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons. To promote research, study, development, and innovation, in 2018 the company Equinor (former Statoil) has made a complete set of field data available under a modified Creative Commons license, the Equinor Open license.

Volve Field

The Volve field is located 200 km west of the city of Stavanger (Norway) and remained in operation between 2008 and 2015. Production rates of 56,000 barrels per day were reported, accumulating a total production of 63 million barrels per day. barrels, reaching a recovery rate of 54%.

Through the use of the Mærsk Inspirer jack-up rig, the Navion Saga ship was used to contain oil before being exported to surface facilities, while gas was channeled to the Sleipner A platform. for final processing and export.

Data

The data set consists of more than 40,000 files (approximately 5 TB), divided into 11 folders, which contain 9 types of data.

  • Geophysical Interpretation
  • Geoscience_OW_Archive
  • Production data
  • Reports
  • Reservoir Modelling
  • Seismic
  • Logging Data
  • Well technical data
  • Drilling Data

From this list, in this post, we are going to focus on the Reservoir Modeling information, to visualize the results in open-source software called ResInsight.

Access to Data

The first step to access the data is to enter the official Equinor company page (https://www.equinor.com/en/what-we-do/digitalisation-in-our-dna/volve-field-data-village-download.html), and after reading some interesting data about the project, it is possible to go to the data download page.

Official landing page of Equinor Volve dataset (https://www.equinor.com/en/what-we-do/digitalisation-in-our-dna/volve-field-data-village-download.html).

To access the data it is necessary to click on the button, as indicated in the image below

Click on “Go to the Volve dataset.data.equinor.com” button.

This page will lead to another window, in which it is necessary to select the LOG IN B2C option.

Click on “LOG IN B2C” button.

Then, it is necessary to enter your credentials (email, and password). In the case of not having an account, it is necessary to follow the instructions to create an account in the system.

Upon entering, we can have all the data sets that Equinor has collected and made available to everyone over the last few years.

At the bottom of the page we can find the data set for the Volve field, on which we click.

Click on the ”Volve Data Village” section.

We must read and accept the disclaimer of the data, where it is stated that we cannot make commercial use of them. We accept, clicking on the Submit button.

Finally, the page generates a URL link, which is unique and non-transferable, and that we are going to use in the Windows Azure Store Explorer.

With this step, we finish the first section of this post series.

Summary

I n this first post we review a brief information regarding the Volve field, as well as create a user account for the system to generate a URL link, which we will use in Part II of this series, in order to visualize the simulation data field reservoir.

In the next post (Part III), we will continue with the process of downloading and installing Windows Azure Storage Explorer, and using the URL link in this section we will be able to access the data.

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Roderick Perez
Roderick Perez

Written by Roderick Perez

Full Time M.Sc. Data Science @ UniWien, Geophysical Engineer, Master in Geology, Doctorate in Geophysics, and MBA.

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