Abstract: Hitting geologic heterogeneities with advanced well architectures: new challenges for reservoir simulation

RENARD, G., P. LEMONNIER, C. BENNIS, G. BLANC, Y. DING, D. URGELLI

The recent developments in drilling technology now provide petroleum engineers with several new well architectures for the production of oil and gas fields. These include horizontal wells and the various types of multilateral wells drilled from a same vertical well or from a same horizontal section. Therefore, improvement of simulation technology in the area of three dimensional reservoir simulation, especially in the vicinity of wells, becomes a major issue.

This paper addresses the various challenges issued by new well architectures when reservoir modeling is concerned and presents innovative solutions developed by IFP through a multidisciplinary approach. There are:

- A good characterization of the distribution of reservoir heterogeneities,
- The automatic generation of various types of grids (cartesian, corner-point, triangular, Voronoi, mixed, . . .) to select the
most adapted one for the complex geometry of the reservoir (heterogeneities, pinch outs, faults, . . .),
-The definition of algorithms capable of determining the best locations of wells in terms of maximum productivity/injec-
tivity with specified constraints on wells geometries and on the reservoir architecture, the generation of grids around advanced
wells and inclusion of these grids in the reservoir grid,
-Efficient upscaling techniques of heterogeneities from geological fine scale to simulation large scale,
-The handling of numerical schemes in unstructured grids,
-A correct numerical treatment and representation of advanced wells in the reservoir grid or own grids to accurately
define wellblocks Productivity Indices,
-Finally, visualization requirements. -

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90942©1997 AAPG International Conference and Exhibition, Vienna, Austria