New OPM Release 2023.10 available

opm_new_release

Dear OPM community,

It is my pleasure to announce that the 2023.10 OPM release is now ready. Thanks to all contributors for your improvements to the software and documentation, and to users for alerting us to bugs and problems.

We dedicate this OPM 2023.10 release to our colleague and friend David Baxendale. David passed away in late June 2023 after a short severe illness. Our thoughts are with his wife and son. The OPM community is very thankful for all his contributions to OPM and the fruitful discussions with him about issues with and advancements of the simulator.

David started contributing to OPM in 2016 as OPMUSER on github and continued his good work until his very last days. We owe the OPM Reference manual to him. He started this heroic effort in 2017 and it now consists of thousands of pages. We, his colleagues and friends, are and will be surely missing him with his reservoir engineering expertise and know-how, his enthusiasm, and humor.

The 2023.10 release consists of some new features and various improvements and bug fixes. Our main target was to support more keywords used for relevant fields and reducing the differences between OPM flow and the commercial simulator. These improvements include

  • Added support for temperature (THERMAL) plus salt precipitation (PRECSALT) modeling in gas-water-brine (GAS-WATER-BRINE) systems
  • Added support for modelling dissolved gas in water (DISGASW) and vaporized water in the gas phase (VAPWAT) in the thermal-gas-water simulator
  • Support for modeling FOAM combined with SOLVENT
  • partial support for WAGHYSTR keyword (Water-Alternating-Gas hystersis)
  • Improvements to many user-facing error messages.
  • More graceful exits for problems in parallel runs.
  • Temperature is output if requested via RPTRST
  • Added support for WBP, WBP4, WBP5 and WBP9 in the SUMMARY section to output well block averaged pressures for open completions
  • Added support for initializing constant flux aquifers from a restart
  • Added support for WBP, WBP4, WBP5 and WBP9 in the SUMMARY section to output well block averaged pressures for open completions
  • Faster two-point flux-approximation introduced in the last release is now also used for linearizing gas-oil cases with energy (with diffusion) and gas-oil diffusion

Full release notes will be available with the updated manual soon. In the meantime you can take a look at our preliminary release notes. Please note that they are just a draft version right now.

Binary packages for the 2023.10 OPM release are available for RHEL 7, as well as for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (code name Jammy Jellyfish) and 20.04 LTS (code name Focal Fossa). The Ubuntu packages may be downloaded from the OPM Project’s Personal Package Archive (ppa:opm/ppa). If you have not already included this in your package sources, you can do so with the commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:opm/ppa
sudo apt-get update

Then you can install the simulator and its prerequisites using the command:

sudo apt install libopm-simulators-bin

You can install python bindings for opm via pip (https://pypi.org/project/opm/) using:

pip install opm

Please note that the new release of our OPM Reference manual still needs some time. We hope to publish it soon. In the meantime we hope that the installation instruction on the website or in the old manual will help you together with the above instructions.

Best Regards,

Markus Blatt

Release manager for 2023.10