CHRISTCHURCH, NZ – September 20, 2017 – ARANZ Geo, developer of Leapfrog 3D geological modelling, has released Leapfrog Geothermal 3.4. The release is the second phase in a major development programme to provide a unified sub-surface solution for the geothermal industry. Leapfrog Geothermal is the only purpose built 3D geothermal modelling solution on the market that integrates with leading reservoir engineering and geophysical software.
Product Director Brennan Williams says, “Our goal is to build a unified sub-surface solution for the geothermal industry that integrates well data, geochemistry data, geophysical data, geological modelling and flow simulation. Leapfrog Geothermal 3.4 has additional bespoke geothermal functionality and can be housed and managed on the Leapfrog Central model management platform. It’s the next phase in achieving our goal.”
Shaun Maloney, Managing Director of ARANZ Geo says, “Our continued focus on the geothermal market reflects our commitment to earth, environmental and energy projects around the world. By bringing the best integrated 3D geological modelling solution to the geothermal industry, we are helping ensure valuable natural resources are managed efficiently and maintained for future generations.”
Global footprint
Leapfrog Geothermal is rapidly becoming the software of choice for the industry, and is now used by six of the top 12 geothermal operators.
Business Development Manager, Jeremy O’Brien says, “Our customers represents a third of all installed capacity globally, with users in, Iceland, East Africa, USA, Mexico, and across Asia Pacific.[i]
“To support this interest we have accelerated our development programme, and this release follows the June release of Leapfrog Geothermal 3.3. We have also expanded our Leapfrog Geothermal team to include technical sales advisors based in London and Perth, to support Europe, Africa and Asia Pacific. Our rapidly expanding global footprint means we’re able to support our customers in all time zones.”
Leapfrog Geothermal 3.4 features
Leapfrog Geothermal is a workflow-based solution which uses implicit modelling to build surfaces directly from data while subsurface professionals use their skill and interpretation to guide the process. Leapfrog Geothermal 3.4 new features include support for IDW (inverse distance weighted) isosurfacing of geophysical gridded data and improvements to the TOUGH2 workflow. The release further enhances major features introduced in 3.3 including Time Based Visualisation of Geophysical Point Data, the new Geophysical Data folder and further develops interaction with model management platform Leapfrog Central.
Williams adds, “Our customers often deal with limited data so it’s important we’re able to help them readily incorporate geophysics such as MT data to inform the reservoir conceptual model and make critical decisions.”
Model management
Leapfrog Geothermal 3.4 further develops operability with model management platform Leapfrog Central, which allows geothermal projects to be stored and managed from a single source of truth. Of particular value to the well-regulated industry, audit trails are easily maintained, security is heightened and version control issues are avoided. The platform also facilitates and improves team collaboration and decision making.
Industry-specific solution
O’Brien says, “Being industry-specific means that Leapfrog Geothermal delivers the efficiency gains that give subsurface professionals time to make better decisions. This latest release introduces some important new features and we look forward to introducing more advancements over the coming months.” Contact Energy’s Reservoir Strategy Manager Warren Mannington says, “The ongoing development of Leapfrog Geothermal continues to match our business needs. Contact Energy uses Leapfrog Geothermal as our primary 3-D visualisation tool and it greatly adds to our understanding of the geothermal system.
“We have worked closely with ARANZ Geo and they are in tune with the requirements of the geothermal community. Their development programme continues to add valuable functionality that gives us greater insight or improves workflow. In particular the new time dependent function for numeric data will be a very useful addition for our reservoir management. We currently visualise our microseismic data in Leapfrog, however the new release will improve our workflows and release the dataset’s full potential in 4D.”
ARANZ Geo will showcase Leapfrog Geothermal 3.4 at the forthcoming GRC Annual Meeting & GEA GeoExpo on 1-4 October in Salt Lake City, Utah and at the New Zealand Geothermal Workshop in Rotorua, New Zealand on 22-24 November.
World Energy Council Report, World
Energy Resources 2016 https://www.worldenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/WEResources_Geothermal_2016.pdf