Abstract
Reservoir simulation is to solve a set of fluid flow equations through porous media, which are partial differential equations from the petroleum engineering industry and described by Darcy’s law. This paper introduces the model, numerical methods, algorithms and parallel implementation of a thermal reservoir simulator that is designed for numerical simulations of a thermal reservoir with multiple components in three-dimensional domain using distributed-memory parallel computers. Its full mathematical model is introduced with correlations for important properties and well modeling. Efficient numerical methods (discretization scheme, matrix decoupling methods, and preconditioners), parallel computing technologies, and implementation details are presented. The numerical methods applied in this paper are suitable for large-scale thermal reservoir simulations with dozens of thousands of CPU cores (MPI processes), which are efficient and scalable. The simulator is designed for giant models with billions or even trillions of grid blocks using hundreds of thousands of CPUs, which is our main focus. The validation part is compared with CMG STARS, which is one of the most popular and mature commercial thermal simulators. Numerical experiments show that our results match commercial simulators, which confirms the correctness of our methods and implementations. SAGD simulation with 7406 well pairs is also presented to study the effectiveness of our numerical methods. Scalability testings demonstrate that our simulator can handle giant models with billions of grid blocks using 100,800 CPU cores and the simulator has good scalability.
Highlights
Reservoir simulations play critical roles in reservoir management, as simulators provide one way to validate production plans in the early stages and to predict future oil and gas production
This paper introduces our work on developing a parallel thermal simulator, including a mathematical model and numerical methods
Different assumptions are made: the water component exists in water and gas phases, heavy oil components exist in oil phase only, light oil components exist in both oil and gas phases, and non-condensable gas components exist in gas phase
Summary
Reservoir simulations play critical roles in reservoir management, as simulators provide one way to validate production plans in the early stages and to predict future oil and gas production. Reservoir simulation is an interdisciplinary research topic, which involves petroleum modeling, applied mathematics, computational methods, and computer sciences. It has been studied for decades, and various models and methods have been proposed [1]. Crookston et al [2] proposed a simple two-dimensional model, which handled three-phase flow and vaporization–condensation effects Grabowski and his collaborators developed a sequential implicit method for thermal reservoir model [3]. Coats was a pioneer in reservoir simulations, and he developed models and numerical methods for black oil model, compositional model and thermal model, including in situ combustion mode [4]. This paper introduces our work on developing a parallel thermal simulator, including a mathematical model and numerical methods. Fluids 2021, 6, 395 ments are carried out to validate our results against commercial simulator, CMG STARS, and to show the scalability of the parallel thermal simulator
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