The OPM-OP company was founded autumn 2019 in Norway. The OPM-OP company is centered around the Open Source reservoir simulator OPM/flow and provides support and custom development of OPM/flow to its customers.

The three founders of OPM-OP have worked with the reservoir simulator flow for several years.

Dr. Markus Blatt (CEO)

Markus holds a PhD in applied mathematics from Heidelberg University. During both his diploma thesis and dissertation he developed highly efficient parallel linear solvers. The parallel algebraic multigrid solver developed by him was the first one making it possible to simulate realistic water infiltration into an acre with more than one trillion unknowns on the Supercomputer JUGENE (IBM Blue Gene/P) with nearly 300,000 cores in scalable way back in 2010.

Markus did his first steps in C++ programming in 1997. After a detour into the programming language JAVA, he has been programming efficient numerical algorithms in C++ since 2000. Since 2004 he is a core developer of the “Distributed and Unfied Numerics Environment” (DUNE), an open source modular toolbox for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) with grid-based methods. His main responsibility is the development and maintenance of the (parallel) linear solvers in DUNE.

Markus fell in love with Linux and open source in 1997 and started contributing to Open Source. He also worked as a Linux system adminstrator for some years. Since 2011 he is an entrepreneur and working as a consultant. He is helping customers developing, improving, and employing custom simulation software based upon Open Source.

His first contribution to OPM and flow dates back to 2012, but has been giving support to OPM as a DUNE developer since the inception of the OPM project. Since 2012 he is part of the OPM development team. He implemented the parallelization of OPM flow (the grid and solver part) and thus made sure it outperforms various other commercial products.

Markus started as the CTO of OPM-OP AS and became CEO in December 2022.

David Baxendale (Chief Reservoir Engineer)

David Baxendale: is the company’s Chief Reservoir Engineer and one of the three Founders of the company. David has over 40 years’ petroleum engineering experience in the oil and gas industry, specializing in reservoir simulation, field development planning, reservoir management and surveillance. He has worked as a technical consultant for several multi-nationals, including ExxonMobil, Unocal (now Chevron) and Shell, as well as for small independents, in various countries around the world. His experience includes:

• Senior Petroleum Engineering Advisor for an international consulting group based in SE Asia, with experience in reserves certification to SPE and SEC guidelines and technical studies, including numerical modelling, in both conventional oil and gas and CBM developments.

• Subsurface Advisor on a major gas development in SE Asia.

• Senior Technical Manager conducting reserves audits to SPE and SEC guidelines for a major oil and gas auditing and certification consultancy group.

• Consultant for a major oil company, conducting reservoir simulation and field development studies on deep water turbidite reservoirs.

• Consultant for a major oil company for 16 Tcf condensate carbonate reef reservoir, responsible for surveillance monitoring, full field 3D compositional simulation studies, corporate reserves reporting, and general reservoir engineering.

• Project lead for various due diligence projects for various buy-side clients including submission of Competent Persons Reports and Valuation Reports to various stock exchanges and regulatory authorities in Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore and the United Kingdom.

He has been an Adjunct Professor at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Department of Petroleum Geosciences from 1996 to 2008, teaching the Petroleum Engineering module for the M.Sc. Geoscience course. He has also given several talks and lectures at the National University of Singapore (“NUS”), as well as supervising part time a PhD student at NUS. Currently, he teaches the Petroleum Engineering module at the Department of Geology, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, as well as several industry courses held in SE Asia.

David holds a Higher National Diploma in Mathematics, Statistics and Computing from Liverpool Polytechnic (1973), a Diploma in Mathematics (equivalent to B.Sc.(Hons.)) from Leicester Polytechnic (1974), with post graduate work conducted at the University of Strathclyde on a M.Sc. in Operational Research (1975). He is a Chartered Mathematician, (C. Math MIMA), a Chartered Scientist (CSci.), a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a Member of the Energy Institute (MEI), a member the Society of Petroleum Engineers of A.I.M.E., past Programme Chairman for the Sarawak Section (1992-1995), and a member of the Operational Research Society.

Currently David writes the OPM Flow User Manual and OPMRUN, the Graphical Interface to OPM Flow.

Joakim Hove (former CEO)

Joakim is 47 years old and holds a PhD in physics from NTNU in Trondheim. The topic of Joakim’s PhD was phase transitions and critical phenoma, with main focus on the normal to superconducting phase transition in superconductors. Monte Carlo simulations on large supercomputers were an integral part of the PhD work, and this was Joakim’s first exposure to professional programming.

Joakim started working in Norsk Hydro in 2006, and stayed in Norsk Hydro/Statoil/Equnior for a total of twelve years. In Norsk Hydro Joakim started as a reservoir engineer and gradually changed to software development. As a software developer in Statoil/Equinor Joakim has mainly worked on ert: software for assisted history matching, and flow.

Joakims professional programming started with Fortran, since then he has changed to mainly focusing on C and C++. During his programming career Joakim has always enjoyed a little Python on the side, and tried to see if it is possible to fit in a little Python in a system based on e.g. C or C++. This also applies to OPM where Joakim has been one of the main forces behind the Python wrappers for the opm input parser, and also for the new in deck Python functionality with keywords PYACTION and PYINPUT.

In flow Joakim has mainly worked with IO, the code that loads the input files and the code which writes the binary result files. Joakim knows more details about the input format used in flow than your psychiatrist recommends.

Joakim was the first CEO of OPM-OP AS until December 2021. After his great work in building up the company he left OPM-OP AS in March 2022