High-Performance Reservoir Simulation with Wafer-Scale Engine for Large-Scale Carbon Storage

Reservoir simulations are essential for subsurface energy applications, but remain constrained by the long runtimes of high-fidelity solvers and the limited generalizability of pretrained machine learning models. This study presents a multiphase reservoir simulator implemented on the Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), a new hardware architecture that delivers supercomputer performance on a single chip. Application development on the WSE is still at a nascent stage, and this study is, to our knowledge, the first to implement a full-physics, two-phase CO2-brine reservoir simulator on WSE, achieving runtimes on the order of seconds for reservoir-scale simulations while preserving full numerical accuracy. The developed simulator incorporates detailed physics for simulating CO2 transport in geological formations. As a case study, we considered CO2 injection into a field-scale reservoir model consisting of over 1.7 million cells. The WSE solver achieves more than two orders of magnitude speedup compared to a conventional CPU-based parallel simulator, completing a 5-year simulation in just 2.8 s. The WSE performance remained nearly unchanged to a four-fold increase in grid resolution, in contrast to the strong slowdown observed with the CPU-based solver. These findings provide the first proof-of-concept of wafer-scale computing for enabling high-resolution, large-scale full-physics simulations in near-real-time, overcoming the tradeoff between speed and accuracy and opening a new paradigm for carbon storage and broader subsurface energy applications.