Abstract
Modeling Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) can involve significant CPU (Central Processing Unit) time when both thermal fluid flow and geomechanics are coupled in order to take into account variations of permeability and porosity inside the reservoir due to stress changes. Here, a numerical procedure that performs thermo-hydro-mechanical simulations, in an efficient way, is presented. This procedure relies on an iterative coupling between a thermal reservoir simulator based on a finite volume method and a geomechanical one based on a finite element method. A strong feature of this procedure is that it allows handling the case when the reservoir simulations are performed using Adaptive Mesh Refinements (AMR). It thus provides an accurate description of the steam front evolution and allows taking geomechanical effects into account without performing the geomechanical simulations on a refined mesh. The efficiency of this coupling procedure is illustrated on a synthetic but realistic SAGD test case.
Highlights
The production of heavy oils and bitumen by injection of steam involves temperature and pressure changes within the reservoir which may modify the stress state of the porous medium
Φ0 where φg(ti+1) stands for the Lagrangian porosity deduced from the geomechanical simulation on Fine reservoir Grid (FG), φr(ti+1) is the Lagrangian porosity used by the reservoir simulator at the end of its run and transferred on FG, φ0 is the initial Lagrangian porosity and CRIT is the convergence criterion
The reservoir porosity correction is set to reach the convergence criterion given by Equation (1) that ensures that porous volumes in geomechanical and reservoir simulators are consistent
Summary
The production of heavy oils and bitumen by injection of steam involves temperature and pressure changes within the reservoir which may modify the stress state of the porous medium. The integration of geomechanics in fluid-flow models often results in simplifications in either of these two domains Another solution consists in coupling classical mechanical and reservoir simulators in an external way to be able to use more advanced functionalities, available in both software (Settari and Mourits, 1998; Longuemare et al, 2002; Jeannin et al, 2005; Tran et al, 2008). The approaches proposed by Guy et al (2011), on one hand and by Lacroix et al (2003) and Mamaghani et al (2011), on the other hand, are combined to propose a new coupling scheme of geomechanical and reservoir simulators to obtain precise production forecasts with reduced computational times.
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