Development and Real Field Application of Two Novel Upscaling Methodologies for Simulating flow in Heterogeneous Reservoirs

摘要

Scale-up techniques are commonly used to coarsen highly detailed geological models with the objective of maintaining near well flow behavior and reservoir connectivity. Existing single phase permeability upscaling methods (ranging from purely Local, Extended Local, Quasi-Global and Global) suffer with limitations in maintaining both near well physics and reservoir connectivity. In this paper we address this challenge by proposing two novel methodologies for single phase permeability and transmissibility upscaling, wherein we combine the individual strengths of purely local and extended local methods in a very practical and efficient manner for capturing the reservoir connectivity and near well region behavior. The first method is based on calculating the effective coarse scale transmissibility from an extended local method and calculating coarse scale permeability from a local method. The local method derived permeability is used to calculate the well PI and effective transmissibility calculated from extended local method is used as a derived property to override the transmissibility generated from purely local method. The second method is based on calculating the effective coarse scale transmissibility from an extended local method while preserving near well region properties using a LGR (local grid refinement) extracted from the fine scale model. The process of defining LGR around wells is fully automated. These methodologies are applied to upscale real field simulation models used for well optimization for deepwater reservoirs. The new methods showed considerable improvement over other existing upscaling methods. Also, these methods are highly applicable for any well count and well placement optimization study as there is no need to perform any additional upscaling every time well location changes. The proposed new upscaling methods provide a practical way of combining different strengths of existing local and extended local methods. They can be easily used in real field well placement and optimization studies as demonstrated, removing a practical limitation of other combination methods of requiring new upscaling to be performed every time well location changes during any well optimization study.