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Coupling Streamlines With Geomechanics Simulation

Abstract

Abstract

The importance of geomechanics and the study of coupling between geomechanics and multiphase flow have been increasingly recognized and used by the industry as deeper formations are discovered and exploited. The knowledge of the state of stress in a reservoir yields a better understanding of the geomechanical implications during exploitation stage, because during the primary recovery stage, changes in pore pressure leads to perturbations in the mechanical equilibrium, affecting the stress state in the formations in a way that alters the rock properties such as permeability and porosity. However, the coupled simulation (hydromechanical) in large field heterogeneous models involves stress and flow equations solving, associated with a large number of degrees-of-freedom which becomes infeasible and computationally costly. In this context, a geomechanical-streamline simulator is presented within a iteratively coupled framework algorithm. In the present work, we applied control volume finite element method for the poromechanics subproblem which provides a Darcy velocity field through a post-processing velocity procedure and porosity as input fields to the transport subproblem. Such subproblem is solved by means of an operator splitting method, which is based on a predictor-corrector scheme with the predictor and corrector steps discretized by a time-of-flight and a finite volume based schemes, respectively. Numerical simulations of water-flooding are compared to the numerical results available in literature, showing good results. In convection-dominated problems, involving a naturally fractured reservoir, the approach was able to predict the saturation distributions for the whole simulation correctly. Furthermore, to appraisal the geomechanical response, numerical simulation was performed in a large reservoir-caprock system in a primary hydrocarbon recovery stage. the formulation presented proved be: an promising alternative to traditional hydro-geomechanical simulation; useful for flow model order reduction in cases where the geomechanical behavior are more important than the flow behavior and a complementary tool for conventional geomechanical simulations.