Application of a New Fully-Coupled Thermal Multiphase Wellbore Flow Model

摘要

Thermal recovery processes are widely applied for the production of heavy oil and oil sands. Thermal reservoir simulation models, however, often lack a comprehensive well modeling capability. Such a capability is required to capture the detailed thermal effects that occur in the wellbore. These effects can be important as they impact wellbore pressure and temperature and thus production and injection. We recently developed a fully-coupled black-oil thermal multiphase wellbore flow model and implemented it into Stanford's General Purpose Research Simulator (GPRS). The model computes pressure, temperature, and oil, water and gas phase fractions along the wellbore as a function of time and includes treatments for slip between fluid phases, heat losses to the reservoir, and general variations of fluid properties with temperature and pressure. The purpose of this paper is to validate and test the coupled wellbore-reservoir model for challenging and realistic cases. The thermal wellbore model is first validated through comparison to field data for three-phase flow in a long well with both vertical and inclined sections. Close agreement between the model and field data is obtained. Complex wells containing multiple branches are then simulated, including a steam-water case with vaporization and condensation. The general conclusion from this work is that the new model is capable of simulating a wide variety of complex coupled reservoir-wellbore phenomena.