Parallel processing of numerical simulation of two-phase flow in fractured reservoirs considering the effect of natural flow barriers using the streamline simulation method

Abstract

Because of the large size of reservoirs and complexity of the fluid behavior, especially in fractured porous media, simulation of hydrocarbon reservoirs is costly to compute using common simulators based on an Eulerian grid. For this reason, the streamlines method, which offers high computational speed and low computational hardware requirements with suitable accuracy can replace common simulators. The current study investigated parallel processing of numerical simulation for two-phase flow in two-dimensional fractured porous media using the streamlines method in OpenMp programming model. For validation, the results of water flooding simulation were compared with the IMPES method and the effect of natural flow barriers for the injection wells has been modeled. The dual porosity model is used to model the fractured reservoirs and transport equations are solved independently on 1D streamlines. It was found that the ability and performance of the streamlines method is better for parallel processing than for other methods based on the Eulerian grid.