SAND

Statistical Analysis of Natural Resource Data

SAND’s primary goal is to use statistical methods to reduce and quantify risk and uncertainty. Our main focus area is stochastic modelling of geology in petroleum reservoirs, including upscaling and history matching. We also have significant activity in risk quantification, primarily within the energy sector.

Established in 1984, SAND is now a significant international contributor to research and services in reservoir description, stochastic modelling, and geostatistics. At the time, geostatistics was introduced to 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 now regularly used in the petroleum industry worldwide.

These ideas continue to evolve and improve, driven by more powerful computers, new data types, better statistical models, and the increasing demand for more advanced solutions as the technology in the petroleum industry progresses. Notably, we have also begun leveraging these methods for CO₂ storage as part of our effort to mitigate climate change.

SAND has a research director and a deputy research director, while the rest of the team consists of researchers. Our employees have backgrounds in statistics, mathematics, physics, numerical analysis, informatics, and geology, and we often collaborate with geoscience professionals to ensure that the issues we work on are relevant to the petroleum industry. We do not have technical staff, and our organisational structure has remained unchanged since the group’s inception.

Our projects are primarily funded by oil companies, software suppliers in the industry, and various grants from the Research Council of Norway or the European Commission.