SAND

Our primary goal is to use statistical methods to reduce and quantify risk and uncertainty. The main area is stochastic modeling of geology in petroleum reservoirs including upscaling and history matching. We also have a significant activity on all types of risk quantification, primarily in the energy sector.

Our employees have backgrounds in statistics, mathematics, physics, numerical analysis and informatics. To ensure that we work with interesting and relevant issues for the petroleum industry, we work closely with professionals in geoscience when this is relevant to the project. Most projects are funded by oil companies, software suppliers in the oil industry and research projects sponsored by the European Commission and the Research Council of Norway.

SAND was established in 1984, and is a significant international contributor to research and services in reservoir description, stochastic modeling and geostatistics. Back then, geostatistics was introduced in the Norwegian petroleum industry to improve how we estimate reserves and recoverable resources. Over time, this has evolved into a set of established methods, mathematical tools, work processes and commercial software that are now regularly used worldwide in the petroleum industry.

These initial ideas are still being developed and refined, and progress is driven by more powerful computers, new data types, better statistical models, and the growing demand for more advanced results as technology in the petroleum industry advances. Notably, we have also started using these methods to store CO2 to mitigate climate change.

SAND’s leadership consists of one research director and a deputy research director, while the rest of our staff are researchers. We do not have technical staff, and this organisational structure has been the same throughout the group’s existence. The size of our team has varied between ten and twenty, largely depending on funding from the petroleum industry.

Our research areas