Eni and Stone Ridge Technology form ECHELON Consortium to lead development of next-generation subsurface flow simulation technology

San Donato Milanese (Milan), 18 November 2021- Italian energy company Eni and U.S.-based Stone Ridge Technology (SRT) announce the formation of an industry consortium that will direct the future development of the ECHELON® ultra high-performance subsurface flow simulation technology. Working cooperatively since 2018, Eni and SRT have developed ECHELON®, an advanced dynamic reservoir simulator, into a full-featured industrial simulator and successfully deployed it over the main Eni’s assets around the world. This technology supports Eni in managing projects uncertainty while improving early understanding of field behavior for more effective business decisions.

New energy industry challenges such as CO₂ and hydrogen storage and geothermal processes, along with the need for ensemble methodologies, uncertainty quantification, more complex physics description, digital transformation initiatives and sustainability are pressing the limits of simulation performance. “ECHELON arrives at just the right time to confront the great energy challenges ahead of our industry.” said Francesca Zarri, Eni Director Technology, R&D & Digital.

Traditional reservoir simulation codes model the subsurface flow of fluids, allowing energy companies to optimize recovery from their assets by evaluating ‘what-if’ scenarios to optimize the development strategies and assets management. The new challenges of the energy transition present even greater computational workloads that require the highest levels of performance and scalability. Simulating green energy processes requires higher models’ resolution, longer forecasts, and new physics resulting in order of magnitude increases in computational demands. Because its foundations are built on the massive parallelism offered by powerful GPUs, ECHELON is the ideal platform for these new challenges.

“The Consortium structure is designed to enable technology sharing and cooperation with energy companies to target and solve their current and future modeling challenges with the industry’s fastest simulation offered by ECHELON.” according to Vincent Natoli, President of Stone Ridge Technology. He adds “ECHELON is unique in the industry, designed and built from inception to perform optimally on massively parallel GPUs, the chips powering the Artificial Intelligence revolution.”

The Consortium is open to membership by other energy companies that aspire to a leadership role in the development of this critical business technology.

About Stone Ridge Technology:

Stone Ridge Technology develops and markets ECHELON, the world’s fastest commercial reservoir simulator built and optimized from inception for GPUs and massive fine-grained parallelism. A U.S. company based in Maryland, SRT has deep expertise in computational science, parallel programming, and high-performance computing.  For more information, visit www.stoneridgetechnology.com.

About Eni:

Eni is an Italian energy company, considered one of the global supermajors, with operations in 73 countries and a market capitalization of US$55 billion, as of June 30, 2017. Eni consistently ranks among the top 100 on Fortune Global 500 list for largest companies by revenue. In 2016, the company was listed in 65th place. For more information go to www.eni.com.