Abstract
The special mechanisms underneath the flow and transport behaviors in unconventional reservoirs are still challenging an accurate and reliable production estimation. As an emerging approach in intelligent manufacturing, the concept of digital twin has attracted increasing attentions due to its capability of monitoring engineering processes based on modeling and simulation in digital space. The application potential is highly expected especially for problems with complex mechanisms and high data dimensions, because the utilized platform in the digital twin can be easily extended to cover more mechanisms and solve highly complicated problems with strong nonlinearity compared with experimental studies in physical space. In this paper, a digital twin is designed to numerically model the representative mechanisms that affect the production unconventional reservoirs, such as capillarity, dynamic sorption, and injection salinity, and it incorporates multiscale algorithms to simulate and illustrate the effect of these mechanisms on flow and transport phenomena. The preservation of physical laws among different scales is always the first priority, and simulation results are analyzed to verify the robustness of proposed multiscale algorithms.
Highlights
The successes in the commercial exploitation of unconventional resources, such as shale gas and tight oil, in North America have already changed the current world energy market, and the growing public concerns on the depletion of conventional oil and gas resources in the foreseeable future stimulates more efforts in both academia and industry to investigate unconventional reservoirs [1, 2]
Modifications and improvements have to be introduced to account for these mechanisms so that the governing systems are generated in order to obey the physical laws as well as realistic conditions
Mesoscopic simulations, like Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) and pore network modeling, are used as a bridge to link between micromechanism and macrophenomena
Summary
The successes in the commercial exploitation of unconventional resources, such as shale gas and tight oil, in North America have already changed the current world energy market, and the growing public concerns on the depletion of conventional oil and gas resources in the foreseeable future stimulates more efforts in both academia and industry to investigate unconventional reservoirs [1, 2]. As a consequence of hydraulic fracturing and shale gas production, groundwater pollution has become a serious issue that haunts oil companies. In order to achieve a better balance between recovery efficiency and environmental impacts, we need to pay more efforts for a thorough understanding of the special mechanisms that control the storage, flow, and transport of unconventional resources in subsurface reservoir in order to meet the growing global energy demands in an environmentally
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