REDBACK: An Open-Source Highly Scalable Geomechanical Modeling Simulator

Abstract

Multiphysics modeling has become an indispensable tool for geomechanics of unconventional reservoirs. Understanding such reservoirs involves the assessment of tightly coupled effects of multiphysics processes, including thermal, hydraulic, mechanical and chemical (THMC) feedbacks. Such numerical models are extremely expensive to run and their power for real world applications relies on the increasing availability of computing resources. The Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) provides a finite-element, multiphysics framework (http://mooseframework.org) that can harness such computational power and allows scientists to develop some tightly-coupled fully implicit multiphysics simulations that run in parallel on large clusters. The open-source MOOSE framework provides a powerful tool to collaborate on numerical modeling activities and we are contributing to its development with REDBACK (https://github.com/pou036/redback), a module for Rock mEchanics with Dissipative feedBACKs. REDBACK builds on MOOSE to provide a THMC simulator where the energetic formulation highlights the importance of all dissipative terms in the coupled system of equations. We show first examples of formations of compaction bands through chemical reactions and fluid flow in unconventional reservoir conditions, where novel analytical solutions have recently become available that highlight critical conditions for formation of fluid channels in tight reservoirs. A specific application to THMC instabilities in high temperature/pressure diagenesis of shale gas reservoirs is presented in our companion paper (Veveakis et al.). The explicit multiphysics-based approach allows further focusing on the critical underlying mechanisms which are driving the resulting behaviors observed. Furthermore the numerical simulator can be used to apply the theoretical models to real field conditions considering material and geometrical complexity.

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90217 © 2015 International Conference & Exhibition, Melbourne, Australia, September 13-16, 2015