Regular Article

Streamline simulation of water-oil displacement in a heterogeneous fractured reservoir using different transfer functions

¹ PhD Candidate of Petroleum Engineering, School of Chemical Engineering, Institute of Petroleum Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
² Professor of Chemical Engineering, Institute of LNG, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
³ Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Applied Multi-Phase Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, School of Mechanical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

^* Corresponding author: avatani@ut.ac.ir

Received: 17 November 2017
Accepted: 1 February 2018

Abstract

Main parts of oil and gas reserves are stored in fractured reservoirs. Simulation of multiphase flow in fractured reservoirs requires a large amount of calculations due to the complexity, reservoir scale and heterogeneity of the rock properties. The accuracy and speed of the streamline method for simulating hydrocarbon reservoirs at field scale make it more applicable than conventional Eulerian simulators using finite difference and finite element techniques. Conventional simulators for fractured reservoirs consume a great deal of time and expense and require powerful CPUs like supercomputers. This makes the development of a fast, powerful and precise simulation method of great importance. The present study was undertaken to develop a computational code as a streamline simulator to study waterflooding in a two-dimensional fractured reservoir with heterogeneous permeability using the Dual Porosity-Single Permeability (DPSP) model. In this simulator, the pressure equation is solved implicitly over an Eulerian grid and then the streamlines are generated using Pollock's semi-analytical method and are traced. At this point, the Time-Of-Flight (TOF) is developed and the saturation equations are mapped and solved explicitly along the streamlines. Next, the results are transferred back onto the Eulerian grid and the calculations are repeated until the simulation end time. In fractured reservoirs, the interaction between the matrix and fracture is included in the transfer functions. Transfer functions model fluid flow and production mechanisms between the matrix and fracture. They introduce source/sink equations between the matrix and fracture and they are distributed throughout the media. In the current study, a problem is simulated using streamline method and several important transfer functions. A new linear transfer function with a constant coefficient is introduced that is based on differences in water saturation between the matrix and fracture. The simulation results were then compared and a commercial software is applied to solve the same problem. The results of the streamline simulator were compared with those of the commercial software and showed appropriate accuracy for the newly introduced transfer function. The accuracy and efficiency of the streamline simulator for simulation of two-phase flow in fractured reservoirs using different transfer functions are confirmed and the results are verified.