Energies, Vol. 18, Pages 5874: High-Performance Reservoir Simulation with Wafer-Scale Engine for Large-Scale Carbon Storage

Energies, Vol. 18, Pages 5874: High-Performance Reservoir Simulation with Wafer-Scale Engine for Large-Scale Carbon Storage

Energies doi: 10.3390/en18225874

Authors:
Mina Khalaf
Hyoungkeun Kim
Alexander Y. Sun
Dirk Van Essendelft
Chung Yan Shih
Guoxiang Liu
Hema Siriwardane

Reservoir simulations are essential for subsurface energy applications, but remain constrained by the long runtimes of high-fidelity solvers and the limited generalizability of pretrained machine learning models. This study presents a multiphase reservoir simulator implemented on the Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), a new hardware architecture that delivers supercomputer performance on a single chip. Application development on the WSE is still at a nascent stage, and this study is, to our knowledge, the first to implement a full-physics, two-phase CO2-brine reservoir simulator on WSE, achieving runtimes on the order of seconds for reservoir-scale simulations while preserving full numerical accuracy. The developed simulator incorporates detailed physics for simulating CO2 transport in geological formations. As a case study, we considered CO2 injection into a field-scale reservoir model consisting of over 1.7 million cells. The WSE solver achieves more than two orders of magnitude speedup compared to a conventional CPU-based parallel simulator, completing a 5-year simulation in just 2.8 s. The WSE performance remained nearly unchanged to a four-fold increase in grid resolution, in contrast to the strong slowdown observed with the CPU-based solver. These findings provide the first proof-of-concept of wafer-scale computing for enabling high-resolution, large-scale full-physics simulations in near-real-time, overcoming the tradeoff between speed and accuracy and opening a new paradigm for carbon storage and broader subsurface energy applications.