Abstract
Most hydrocarbon reservoirs contain faults, which are highly complex heterogeneous and anisotropic three-dimensional (3D) volumes of deformed rock. A major technical challenge in full-field flow simulation is to represent the effects of 3D fault zone structure within the two-dimensional (2D) fault planar surfaces using the industry standard commercial reservoir flow simulator due to its limited functionality. Therefore, a new flow-based geometrical upscaling (FBGU) method has been developed for capturing the effects of 3D fault zone structures in conventional low-resolution upscaled flow simulation models. Geometrical upscaling (GU) is the process of calculating across-fault and up-fault transmissibility arising from 3D flow paths through fault zones, and expressing these transmissibilities as implicit connections in a low-resolution upscaled flow simulation model. The high accuracy of the method is demonstrated by comparing the flow responses of high-resolution (referred as truth model in this paper) simulation models in which the 3D fault zone structure is represented explicitly in the grid geometry, with that of conventional resolution models in which it is upscaled using FBGU method. The flow results show that the newly developed FBGU method is extremely accurate and geometrically flexible.
Highlights
The accuracy of the newly devised flow-based geometrical upscaling (FBGU) method is tested by comparing the flow results of the truth model with those of the upscaled model for three synthetic test reservoirs (Table 1) in terms of reservoir performance (Fig. 3), individual layer or well performances (Fig. 4), and cell oil saturation through time (Figs 5 and 6)
These figures reveal that the saturation profile of the upscaled models of three reservoir test cases are very similar to the corresponding truth models, implying that the newly developed FBGU method is an accurate means of representing sub-seismic fault zone components into upscaled flow simulation models
The results demonstrate a remarkable similarity between the truth models and upscaled versions, confirming the conclusion of Islam and Manzocchi[26] that the new FBGU approach developed in this research is significantly better than the earlier template-based geometrical upscaling (TBGU) approach[18]
Summary
These results imply that the newly devised FBGU method is an accurate way of representing sub-seismic fault zones into low-resolution upscaled models. These figures reveal that the saturation profile of the upscaled models of three reservoir test cases are very similar to the corresponding truth models, implying that the newly developed FBGU method is an accurate means of representing sub-seismic fault zone components into upscaled flow simulation models.
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