SUBSURFACE INSIGHTS LLC — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: 02b

Description

Actionable understanding of system behavior in the subsurface is required for a wide spectrum of societal and engineering needs by both commercial firms and government entities. These needs include, for example, water resource management, precision agriculture, contaminant remediation, unconventional energy production, CO2 sequestration monitoring and climate studies. Such actionable understanding requires the ability to, as accurately as possible, numerically model various coupled processes and associated reactions that occur across different temporal and spatial scales. Such coupled processes typically include both physical behavior (e.g. fluid, heat and material flow) as well as multiple equilibrium and kinetically controlled biogeochemical reactions. While numerical models, data, and computational resources exist to simulate these processes the expertise required to run such models is in practice cost prohibitive to acquire for most companies. A web application will be developed which will provide an easy way for commercial users to configure and run the DOE developed advanced reactive transport modeling code PFLOTRAN. Users will be able to easily ingest data from different sources, run models and visualize results. The models will be executed on commercial cloud computing resources so that users do not have to be experts in parallel computing to use the models. In Phase I we will develop an initial version of the web application. The web application will include both a Graphical User Interface and server side databases and automation scripts. Subsurface Insights will demonstrate the performance of the web application by using it to setup and run existing benchmark models so that we can assess overall performance. A key requirement for optimum use of subsurface resources is the ability to accurately simulate complex processes. Subsurface Insights will develop a wrapper around existing high end DOE modeling software which will allow commercial entities to efficiently use this software. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: This system will allow commercial users to run complex subsurface models on demand. The results will benefit understanding and management of subsurface resources.