SOCORRO, N.M. – The Earth and Environmental Science and the Petroleum Engineering Department and the Petroleum Research Recovery Center (PRRC) at New Mexico Tech are the recipients of a generous donation of imaging software suites.

Petroleum Experts Limited, or PetEx, recently donated 10 copies of 10 different software packages that relate to 2D and 3D modeling of the Earth’s subsurface. The commercial value of the donation is more than $5 million. The Scotland-based company specializes in petroleum engineering software products for the oil industry. They offer educational licenses to a limited number of accredited universities that offer graduate programs in geology and petroleum engineering. The company's Houston office, Petroleum Experts Inc., facilitated the donation.

Petroleum engineering professor Dr. Tan Nguyen said the PetEx software packages will provide valuable learning tools to NMT students interested in modeling and structural analysis.

Brandon Lutz, Ph.D. student in geology, continues to use this software for his dissertation work. Lutz and recently-retired geology professor Dr. Gary Axen are using the Move software for an NSF-funded project to make a 3D model of a large region between Las Vegas, Nevada, and the southern Sierra Nevada in California, including the famous Death Valley area.

“Thanks to this generous donation from PetEx, our students and scientists will have greater opportunities to use this leading edge technology to better understand the subsurface and gain experience in modeling,” Nguyen said.

Lutz said he’s been using the software modules for several years to great depth.

He's been using it for a range of different research tasks on his NSF-funding project. He’s developing structural models of the fault systems of the Basin and Range region of the western U.S.

“Fault blocks get separated, and, with this software, you can put them back together,” Lutz said. “You can simulate all sorts of structural deformation in the Earth. You can do 2D and 3D models on just about anything – rock layers, fault systems, fracture mechanics. I’ve used it to build a 3D reconstruction of the Death Valley area.”

‘This is state-of-the-art mining and petroleum software,” Lutz said. “It’s very powerful and you can do really intricate modeling with it. I could go on and on about it.”

The company donated the following modules: PROSPER, GAP, PVTP, MBAL, REVEAL, RESOLVE, MOVE, 2D Kinematic Modelling, 3D Kinematic Modelling, Geomechanical Modelling, Fracture Modelling, Fault Response Modelling, Fault Analysis, Stress Analysis, MOVE Link for Petrel, MOVE Link for OpenWorks, and MOVE Link for GST.

The MOVE suite is marketed as the most complete structural modelling and analysis toolkit available. It provides a full digital environment for best practice structural modelling to reduce risk and uncertainty in geological models.

– NMT –