High-Performance Reservoir Simulation with Wafer-Scale Engine for Large-Scale Carbon Storage

Mina Khalaf (), Hyoungkeun Kim, Alexander Y. Sun (), Dirk Van Essendelft, Chung Yan Shih, Guoxiang Liu and Hema Siriwardane
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Mina Khalaf: National Energy Technology Laboratory, 626 Cochran Mill Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15236, USA
Hyoungkeun Kim: National Energy Technology Laboratory, 1450 SW Queen Ave, Albany, OR 97321, USA
Alexander Y. Sun: National Energy Technology Laboratory, 626 Cochran Mill Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15236, USA
Dirk Van Essendelft: National Energy Technology Laboratory, 3610 Collins Ferry Rd, Morgantown, WV 26505, USA
Chung Yan Shih: National Energy Technology Laboratory, 626 Cochran Mill Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15236, USA
Guoxiang Liu: National Energy Technology Laboratory, 626 Cochran Mill Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15236, USA
Hema Siriwardane: National Energy Technology Laboratory, 3610 Collins Ferry Rd, Morgantown, WV 26505, USA

Energies, 2025, vol. 18, issue 22, 1-22

Abstract: 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 CO 2 -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 CO 2 transport in geological formations. As a case study, we considered CO 2 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.

Keywords: wafer scale engine; high-performance computing; reservoir simulation; numerical modeling; finite difference; multiphase flow; carbon storage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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