Abstract: New Developments in the 3D Simulation of Evolving Petroleum Systems With Complex Geological Structures

Mello, Ulisses T.; Cavalcanti, P. R. - IBM T. J. Watson Research Center; Moraes, A. and Bender, A. - Petrobras/Cenpes

Three-dimensional basin-wide simulation of generation, migration and accumulation of hydrocarbons has vast potential as a risk assessment tool in petroleum exploration. In order to fulfill this potential, several challenges have to be addressed including the modeling of the evolution of complex geological structures such as salt diapirs and faults. We have designed and we are in the process of implementing a novel architecture that specifically addresses technical challenges such as 3D representation of geological models, meshing, parallel computing, and visualization of the massive amount of data involved in these simulations. The core of this architecture is a 3D topological framework for the representation of evolving geological structures that enables numerical simulation of geological processes undergoing large deformations within sedimentary basin and lithosphere. In this framework, the topology (or informally, connectivity) is separated from the geometry of the geological models, making it possible to update the geometry minimizing changes in the model topology. This framework stores explicitly adjacency information of geological structures that can be easily modified with topological operators representing tectonic events (e.g., faulting). Each sub-region of the geological model can be represented by a set of multi-structure and multi-resolution meshes. This is because a mesh is treated as a possible realization of the geometric model and hence as an attribute of the topology. This architecture greatly facilitates the automatic meshing and re-meshing associated with large deformations such as those associated with the formation and evolution of salt diapirs. In addition, this architecture was designed to consider the geometry of geological elements in the partitioning of the computational domain and, thus, it is suitable to the solution the partial differential equations in parallel. This is beneficial because of the large computational resources required to solve numerically the equations governing heat and fluid transport processes within sediments.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90933©1998 ABGP/AAPG International Conference and Exhibition, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil