The OPM initiative will provide a long-lasting, efficient, and well-maintained, open-source software for flow and transport in porous media built on modern software principles. The resulting software should:

• have functionality supporting multiple application areas
• handle industrially relevant cases
• be easy to extend with new functionality
• be built on open source code principles
• have a relatively low user threshold

The OPM initiative is based on a collaborative effort of several research groups, each having a different research focus, and will mainly target developers and advanced users of new modelling schemes and computational methodologies within academia and industry. Graphical user interfaces and integrated work flows will be given more attention when a sufficiently wide user-base has been established.

The suite will be released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) software license, which is the most popular license for free software. The motivation is to provide a means to unite industry and public research on simulation of flow and transport in porous media. For academic users, we seek to provide a software infrastructure that facilitates testing of new ideas on models with industrystandard complexity, while at the same time giving the researcher control over discretisation and solvers. Similarly, we aim to accelerate the technology transfer from academic institutions to professional companies by making new research results available as free software of professional standard.

The idea of an open-source simulator suite for flow and tranport in porous media was initially set forth by Dr. Alf Birger Rustad at the StatoilHydro Research Center, Trondheim. The OPM initiative is initially supported by five research groups in Norway and Germany. Based on existing grants from public research agencies and funding from StatoilHydro, the five research groups will make the first steps towards developing the OPM simulation suite. However, a full-scale development of the OPM initiative requires substantially more funding and involvement of more research groups and potential end users.

Read more: goals and research tasks.

To obtain the software, go to the download page.

Projects

The OPM software suite is mainly developed in two projects:

• Clastic:  a joint-industry project funded by Statoil Petroleum and Total E&P Norge. The project aims at developing OPM with simulation capabilities of enhanced oil recovery processes from clastic reservoirs. Research partners are: IRIS Petroleum, SINTEF ICT, University of Heidelberg, and University of Stuttgart.
• Numerical CO₂-laboratory: a knowledge-building project funded by Statoil Petroleum and CLIMIT program at the Research Council of Norway. The project aims at developing OPM with simulation capabilities of basic mechanisms for trapping CO₂ in aquifers and abandoned petroleum fields. Research partners are: SINTEF ICT, IRIS Petroleum, University of Bergen, and Uni Research/CIPR.

Both projects focus on developing simulation tools based on modern software principles using compiled languages (C++/C). In addition, SINTEF ICT is developing the Matlab Reservoir Simulation Toolbox (MRST), which provides a script-based interface to solvers in OPM. MRST also implements the same solvers in native Matlab and can thus be used independently.