Reservoir simulation

Workflow Allows Unstructured Coarse Gridding and Upscaling of Models for Flow Simulation

The authors of this paper present an adaptive grid-coarsening approach based on constraints that honor reservoir structure and stratigraphy, preserve fluid volumes and contacts, and retain resolution near wells.

Coastal Bend model (horizontal permeability). Faults are shown in black
Coastal Bend model (horizontal permeability). Faults are shown in black.
Source: SPE 223869.

Scalable flow simulation is an extremely useful reservoir engineering capability with applications to model calibration, uncertainty estimation, field optimization, and reservoir management. Recent examples have emphasized the formulation of simulation problems as pore volume/transmissibility networks to develop fast physics-based proxy models. In the study described in the complete paper, the authors develop an adaptive grid-coarsening approach based on constraints that honor reservoir structure and stratigraphy, preserve fluid volumes and contacts, and retain resolution near wells. The technique may be implemented within commercial reservoir simulators.

Problem Statement

The commercial simulator used includes several powerful features within its grid-coarsening implementation.

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