AWARDS FINALIST: Māpuna - Contact's innovative geothermal well management solution – Contact Energy
Contact Energy has replaced a patchwork of legacy software and spreadsheets with a new geothermal reservoir management platform that has improved well monitoring and slashed the time needed for some engineering tasks.
The system, known as Māpuna, was developed internally by Contact's geothermal specialists and technology team, and launched in June 2024. It consolidates data from more than 70 years of geothermal operations into a single system used for well and reservoir management.
Māpuna - the Māori word for reservoir - was developed after a decade-long search for a commercial software option. Multiple external solutions were trialled, but none delivered the combination of functionality required for its operations.
It is a finalist in the innovation category at this year's New Zealand Energy Excellence Awards.
Contact manages more than 650 production, injection, and monitoring wells across the Taupō region. The company said understanding the location, condition and performance of those wells is critical for forecasting steamfield output, planning maintenance, assessing reservoir health, and identifying future drilling opportunities.
Māpuna combines data on well locations, geology, well condition, casing integrity and pressure, temperature, and spinner surveys into a single platform.
Contact says the system allows engineers to analyse multiple datasets simultaneously, rather than exporting information from separate systems for manual processing.
Experience
The platform also incorporates engineering calculations and analysis tools developed using industry practices and Contact's geothermal operating experience.
That integrated functionality was not available through the firm's previous internal tools or from commercially available alternatives.
Contact says the new system is already delivering measurable productivity gains. Processing XY Calliper well-condition data, for example, has been reduced from around 24 minutes to less than one minute.
In another workflow, data that previously took about 30 minutes to assemble and visualise is now immediately available within the platform. A process that previously took about one-and-a-half hours to collect and record well pressure data can now be completed through an automated report in about 30 seconds.
Beyond productivity improvements, Contact said Māpuna supports operational decision-making by providing earlier visibility of changes in well and reservoir conditions before they affect electricity generation. The platform is used by reservoir engineering, drilling, operations, and asset management teams, and serves as a central source of geothermal data across the business.
The cloud-hosted platform was built on Amazon Web Services infrastructure and designed to support future expansion. In April, Contact added new capabilities, including groundwater data management, multi-well comparison tools and functionality to calculate well discharge pressure after shut-in periods.
Contact says Māpuna has improved geothermal data management, reduced reliance on undocumented manual processes and improved its ability to manage and further develop the geothermal reservoirs it manages.
The annual Energy Excellence Awards will be held in Wellington on 19 August. The Innovation in Energy Award is sponsored by Fujitsu.