Writing commercial versus academic hydraulic fracturing simulators

ABSTRACT: There are numerous commercial hydraulic fracturing simulators and even a higher number of their academic counterparts. At the end of the day, only a few end up being used regularly and for extended periods of time, and this has a reason. In this presentation, I will share my experience in contributing to both academic and commercial simulators, covering their overall goals, general characteristics, similarities, and differences. Certain aspects lie on a surface, such as the purpose of an academic simulator is to generate good quality results for a few publications, and the purpose of a commercial simulator is to solve an industry problem for many scenarios and as fast as possible. At the same time, there are subtle nuances that are not obvious and are not often discussed, while they can determine the long term outcome. Finally, I will cover an example of different hydraulic fracture front tracking algorithms and how they made contributions to both academic and commercial simulators.