Volsung: A Comprehensive Software Package for Geothermal Reservoir Simulation

Abstract

This paper describes the development, testing and application of a new geothermal reservoir modelling software package Volsung. Volsung is commercially available and was developed to provide a single platform for all reservoir modelling needs. It includes a new reservoir simulator, a wellbore model, surface network model and a graphical user interface to simplify building, running and visualising models. Volsung is able to run fully coupled reservoir/wellbore/surface simulations which enables geothermal operators to use modelling tools for overall field and plant optimization. Benchmark speed testing shows Volsung to be an order of magnitude faster than conventional TOUGH2 with speedup enabled by parallel simulation on GPUs. The key philosophy in Volsung is that all tools make use of internally consistent methods and that they are fast, stable and easy to use.