Study on Validation of the OPM Reservoir Simulator by Comparative Solution Project

Abstract

The Open Porous Media (OPM) reservoir simulation toolkit is a free and open-source development in the reservoir simulation world and one that has received very little attention. OPM Flow is a fully-implicit, black-oil simulator capable of running industry-standard simulation models, which encourage open innovation and reproducible research on modeling and simulation of porous media processes. This study validates and assesses the capabilities of OPM Flow comparing with the industry standard ECLIPSE simulator. Several tests were conducted in order to validate the simulator, including a zero- balance test, symmetrical well test, three simulation models based on the SPE Comparative Solution Project, and a real world dataset from the Norne oilfield in Norway. This variety of tests covers a wide range of reservoir types and specific operating conditions which are representative of expected applications of the software. By comparison it is concluded that OPM Flow reservoir simulator can be considered a validated and capable reservoir simulator that is able to compete with Schlumberger ECLIPSE in many cases and shows great potential for future development. In addition, a basic user interface for queuing and running simulations through the OPM Flow simulator was developed using the Python programming language as well as some modifications to the miscible flooding solver.