3D compositional reservoir simulation in conjunction with unstructured grids

Abstract

In the last decade, unstructured grids have been a very important step in the development of petroleum reservoir simulators. In fact, the so-called third generation simulators are based on Perpendicular Bisection (PEBI) unstructured grids. Nevertheless, the use of PEBI grids is not very general when full anisotropic reservoirs are modeled. Another possibility is the use of the Element based Finite Volume Method (EbFVM). This approach has been tested for several reservoir types and in principle has no limitation in application. In this paper, we implement this approach in an in-house simulator called UTCOMP using four element types: hexahedron, tetrahedron, prism, and pyramid. UTCOMP is a compositional, multiphase/multicomponent simulator based on an Implicit Pressure Explicit Composition (IMPEC) approach designed to handle several hydrocarbon recovery processes. All properties, except permeability and porosity, are evaluated in each grid vertex. In this work, four case studies were selected to evaluate the implementation, two of them involving irregular geometries. Results are shown in terms of oil and gas rates and saturated gas field.