Meshing and visualization of oilfields

To optimize the exploitation of a new oilfield it is necessary to do computer simulations in order to determine the number and the geometrical positions of oil wells. Mathematical models are used to estimate the evolution of the production of an oilfield according to the 3D geometry of this oilfield, the number of wells used, the geometry of these wells and some economical parameters. An important step is to compute and visualize the oilfield meshing adapted to the mathematical method used in the simulation process. After a brief introduction to oilfields engineering, we describe two solutions to mesh the domain. The first one is to use only parallelepipeds as meshes with an algorithmic computation of neighbours, which allows one to efficiently mesh a huge domain when the oil wells are vertical. When oil wells have a complex geometry, we show how to use Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations to mesh the domain. This work illustrates the growing importance of visualization methods in the petroleum industry.