Development of a novel framework for sequential coupling of reservoir, wells, and surface facilities

Abstract

Petroleum production systems consist of three individual elements that are operating together: reservoir, wells, and surface facilities. Design, construction, and maintenance of surface facilities for hydrocarbon production require realistic simulation studies. These studies become much more realistic when well and surface facilities are simulated together with the reservoir. In this work, a literature survey was performed and different coupling approaches were discussed. Then, the new framework was introduced as a tool for coupling the reservoir, well and surface facility using the in-house UTCOMP simulator. UTCOMP is a compositional simulator, which has been developed at The University of Texas at Austin. This formulation is designed to use flow tables in order to compute wells and surface facility interactions. The presented framework enabled UTCOMP to read surface facilities data, which were generated by a commercial simulator. Some new software was developed to read and compare the flow table’s data and enable surface facility option within UTCOMP. In this study, the new features added to UTCOMP were: (a) inserting a new flow table option, (b) including surface pipelines length and diameter, (c) calculation of operational condition like gas-oil ratio and water-oil ratio at the surface condition and (d) an output file for surface facilities information. Also, we show results of two case studies. Using the developed tool, we are able to understand the behavior of petroleum production systems and identify the main factors that affect production operations.