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Analogue Computers and Oil Reservoir Modelling

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Technology for Modelling

Part of the book series: History of Computing ((HC))

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Abstract

It is common for histories of computing to discuss the transition from one technical paradigm to another. However, historians would also agree that such transitions are rarely clear-cut and occur over a period of time. By 1960 digital computers had become increasingly dominant, so this chapter considers why in 1961 the research division of BP, a world class petroleum company, chose to install an analogue computer. The chapter describes the history of using electrical models—particularly electrolytic tanks and resistance networks—for modelling subterranean reservoir systems. Again, we see how modelling culture was crucial to the application of analogue computing techniques. Furthermore, the study demonstrates how BP researchers were using both analogue and digital computers. It is concluded that analogue–digital superiority was not an immediate concern of these users. Instead of alternatives, these two classes of computer were complements.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Anon. (1962a) p. 20.

  2. 2.

    BP installed an English Electric Deuce in 1956 to perform refinery related calculations, but the machine was also extensively applied to solve Operational Research problems. See Bamberg (2000) pp. 398–399.

  3. 3.

    The association between these electrical models and analogue computing was forged as the inventors of reservoir analysers began to patent their work. Many early inventors of these analysers did not refer to analogue computing. However, either their patent attorneys or the patent offices saw the connection. The patents are all classified as computing technology.

  4. 4.

    BP Newsletter (1961b). Carter were a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company.

  5. 5.

    Carter (1961) notes that prior to the mid-1920s, there was no significant or organised production research with a long-term perspective. What did exist was ‘sporadic and unorganised’ and ‘primarily for immediate utility’ (p. 1098). For Constant (1989) it was not until the end of World War II that reservoir engineering was fully developed into a ‘mathematically rigorous, well formulated body of esoteric knowledge’ (p. 444). This formalisation of production research offered significant improvements. Barger and Schurr (1972) estimated that in the early years of petroleum production the total recovery of a well was only in the region of 10–20 percent of the total amount of oil present. By the 1970s this proportion had increased to between 70 and 80 percent (p. 204).

  6. 6.

    Carter (1961) pp. 1026 and 1097.

  7. 7.

    See, for example, Craft and Hawkins (1959) p. 205.

  8. 8.

    Earlier analogue models of reservoirs were developed during the 1930s. A history of Petroleum Engineering published in 1961 referred to the work of Wyckoff, Botse & Muskat. Published in 1933, this work used an electrolytic tank to model reservoir pressures. See Carter (1961) p. 1097, Soroka (1956) p. 364. A number of engineers were also developing scale modelling techniques to represent reservoirs.

  9. 9.

    May 1946 issue of Carter Oil’s newsletter The Link.

  10. 10.

    Only three months passed between his last publication to acknowledge the University of Washington and the first to mention an affiliation to Carter. See Bruce (1938b), Jauncey and Bruce (1938) p. 163, Severinghaus (1939) p. 594.

  11. 11.

    See Severinghaus (1939) p. 594, Bruce (1939) p. 578.

  12. 12.

    See Bruce (1947/1943, 1949/1945a, 1949/1945b).

  13. 13.

    A contemporary paper (Odeh et al. 1956) commented on how the method had become ‘an accepted procedure’ (p. 200).

  14. 14.

    Between 1949 and 1953, Sun Oil filed six patent applications for technologies relating to reservoir analysers, three of which were assigned to Omar L. Patterson. It is in this work that we can see the developing association between the reservoir analyser and analogue computation, two of the patents being entitled Analog Computer or Analyzer (Patterson 1955/1949, 1957/1950). Initially, Bruce had not made reference to analogue, analogy or computer, and throughout his 1945 patent application had described his circuits as an ‘electrical counterpart of a reservoir’ (Bruce 1947/1943, col. 2). Later analysers would be described as electrical analogues, marking the beginning of their enrollment into the discipline of analogue computing.

  15. 15.

    The gas cap analogue was incorporated into a patent filed in 1950 and an account was published in 1951. See Patterson (1957/1950), Patterson et al. (1956) p. 79.

  16. 16.

    Patterson (1958/1951), Jung (2005) p. 782.

  17. 17.

    See Sect. 2.5.2, p. 49.

  18. 18.

    See Patterson (1955/1949) col. 2.

  19. 19.

    Patterson (1955/1949). Other models mounted the probe on a carriage above a tank (Yetter 1958/1952). The use of a roaming probe and pantograph mechanism had already been used to effect by Alexander Wolf and Burton Lee, researchers working for the Texas Oil Company (later renamed Texaco). Lee was the assistant director of the Geophysical Laboratory at Texas Co. and his team made a variety of improvements to reservoir analysers between 1945 and 1951. See Wolf (1951/1947), Wolf and Lee (1951/1947), Lee (1951/1947, 1948), Lee and Herzog (1951/1949), Stelzer and Herzog (1954/1949, 1957/1951), Loofbourrow et al. (1957/1952), Stelzer (1961/1956).

  20. 20.

    See Patterson et al. (1956) p. 74. The Holt-Bryant reservoir was discovered in 1944 and was yielding oil by 1948.

  21. 21.

    BP Exploration Research Minutes (1958) p. 2. See also p. 133, below.

  22. 22.

    This committee met quarterly and provided a link between the research personnel of BP’s Exploration Research Division and M.H. Lowson, the division’s technical manager (see Fig. 6.4). BP’s research program had originally begun in 1917, located in the basement of an old country house. By 1960 the operation had expanded into a large department occupying a nineteen acre research centre at Sunbury-on-Thames, a facility employing over 1300 personnel. The exploration research team were located within the Sunbury complex. See BP Newsletter (1961c), Matthews (1962, p. 9).

  23. 23.

    A chemist by training, Birks had obtained a Ph.D. for research into evaporation from the University of Leeds in 1949. See Birks and Bradley (1949).

  24. 24.

    Birks (1956) p. 2.

  25. 25.

    Birks (1956) p. 2.

  26. 26.

    BP Exploration Research Minutes (1958) p. 4.

  27. 27.

    It can be assumed that it was Keep who was sent to Dallas for training as he became the central expert and motivator for the BP installation, taking a leading role in the specification of the required machine.

  28. 28.

    Keep (1958) p. 1.

  29. 29.

    Keep (1958) p. 3.

  30. 30.

    BP Exploration Research Minutes (1958) p. 2.

  31. 31.

    BP Exploration Research Minutes (1958) p. 1.

  32. 32.

    Anon. (1959a) p. 22, Hamilton (1997) p. 82. EMI were pioneers of a number of electronic products including medical scanners, computers, radar, and domestic television.

  33. 33.

    EMI (1961) p. 8.

  34. 34.

    Emiac users included De Havilland Propellers, Whitworth Gloster, Hobson Ltd, and the Australian Government Aircraft Factory. Units were also sold to a number of university engineering departments at UMIST, Oxford University, Cranfield and Witwatersrand University of Johannesburg. See EMI (1959, 1962a, 1962b, 1963c, 1965b), Bennington (1964). The installations at de Havilland Propellers in Hatfield, and Armstrong-Whitworth in Coventry were also, like the BP analyser, large arrays of Emiac II modules, the installations costing £52,000 and £55,000 respectively. See Anon. (1959b) p. 35.

  35. 35.

    For example, if a user required more integrators than normal, C Boxes containing other components could be removed and replaced by integrator components. A full range of boxes incorporating all the common analogue computing components were available. The computer featured removable patch panels so that problems could be ‘patched up’ away from the computer. For a detailed technical description of the Emiac see EMI (1963b).

  36. 36.

    Anon. (1963b) p. 151, EMI (1963a) p. 14.

  37. 37.

    This machine consisted of an Emiac II module connected to a console containing the patch panel and control components used to build resistance networks. The connection between the hardware and the computer is through a special C Box which extends out of the computer further than the other 17 boxes. See Harvey (1968).

  38. 38.

    BP Exploration Research Minutes (1957) pp. 1–2.

  39. 39.

    Gill (1963) p. 3.

  40. 40.

    Peaceman published several papers (detailed in his account) and also a book on numerical reservoir simulation (Peaceman 1977). Like Carter, Humble was another subsidiary of Standard Oil.

  41. 41.

    Peaceman (1990) p. 108. Rachford and Peaceman would become well-known for developing what is now called the ‘alternating direction implicit’ (or ADI) mathematical method. See Usadi and Dawson (2006).

  42. 42.

    Compare Craft and Hawkins (1959) pp. 205–210, and Peaceman (1977) pp. 1–2.

  43. 43.

    A research outlook represents those involved in computer research and development—the communities that actually created the distinctions between the technologies. For example, John Mauchly and other digital computing pioneers at the Moore School, were among the first to articulate a clear distinction between analogue and digital. See Sect. 2.5.1, p. 47, above. To develop the language with which to discuss the emerging technology of computers, it was necessary for pioneers to identify classifications and types between different machines, approaches and representations.

  44. 44.

    See Campbell-Kelly and Aspray (1996) pp. 143–145, Augarten (1985) p. 196.

  45. 45.

    The Whirlwind project exceeded both its allocation of time and funding and took on a far more research based approach to real-time computing. Although Forrester is correctly credited with having the foresight that general purpose digital computers were far more powerful and versatile tools, his design choice was only possible because of quite exceptional funding. Project Whirlwind proved that digital computers could be constructed to work in real-time and so take on tasks that analogue computers had previously been used for. However, affordable digital alternatives to analogue computing were much slower in coming to everyday applications.

  46. 46.

    BP Exploration Research Minutes (1958) p. 3.

  47. 47.

    BP Exploration Research Minutes (1958) p. 3. Recall that there was an English Electric Deuce available, however the reservoir engineers needed continual access to a computer over the modelling study. Their work did not fit within the batch process model.

  48. 48.

    Docksey quoted in BP Exploration Research Minutes (1958) p. 3.

  49. 49.

    The digital computer facilities were a priority because of the possibility of shared use with other teams, the machine being applicable to ‘any type of numerical calculation and not only for petroleum engineering problems’. See BP Exploration Research Minutes (1957) pp. 1–2.

  50. 50.

    ‘Report on the activities of the Research and Engineering Department’ in BP Annual Report (BP 1963, p. 31). The Atlas installation was actually owned by the University of London. BP provided a quarter of the funding and received a portion of computing time for five years. See BP Newsletter (1961a).

  51. 51.

    See the review article by Pratt (2001). In fact, Pratt identified that this chapter ‘stray[ed] from the thematic coherence’ of the rest of the text (p. 825).

  52. 52.

    Gill (1963) p. 2.

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    Dr. Charles Care

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Care, C. (2010). Analogue Computers and Oil Reservoir Modelling. In: Technology for Modelling. History of Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-948-0_6

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