סמינר מחלקתי Avinoam Rabinovich
School of Mechanical Engineering Seminar
Monday, December 7, 2015 at 15:00
Wolfson Building of Mechanical Engineering, Room 206
Petroleum Reservoir Modeling: Upscaling Flow
with Capillary Heterogeneity Effects
Dr. Avinoam Rabinovich
Department of Energy Resources Engineering Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Reservoir modeling is an area of petroleum engineering focused on characterizing reservoirs and simulating flow associated with injection and production of oil and natural gas. In this talk I will begin with a short overview on reservoir modeling with emphasis on upscaling. Modeling multi-phase flows in reservoirs consists of solving complex non-linear equations. Typically, reservoir scale flow on the order of hundreds of meters are simulated on grids of about a meter in size and computation is therefore very expensive. Furthermore, reservoir properties are spatially variable and subject to uncertainty so that often many different realizations of the geological model are considered. This adds to the computational cost resulting in many cases in unrealistic simulation times. Upscaling is a means of reducing the computational cost by transitioning to larger grid blocks assigned with equivalent properties. A new method for upscaling two-phase flow with strong capillary heterogeneity effects will be presented. This method was tested on a synthetic two-dimensional reservoir model simulating an aquifer injected with CO2, for possible use in CO2 sequestration applications.
Another aspect of reservoir modeling is estimation of subsurface properties, e.g., permeability. Recently, interest has grown in characterization using oscillatory pumping tests. New field test results will be presented, in which a periodic pressure signal is generated by pumping and injecting water into an aquifer consecutively and the pressure response is recorded at many points around the source. Hydraulic equivalent properties are then estimated by matching measurements to an analytical solution and values are shown to be in agreement with previous estimates conducted at this site.
