Abstract
Accurate representation of near-well flow is an important subject matter in reservoir simulation. In today’s field-scale reservoir simulation, cell-centered structured grids remain the predominant practice. Typically, well inflow performance of the perforated cells is connected to the finite-volume solution via well indices which may not be well defined when the wellbore intersects the finite-volume cells in a complex trajectory. Fine gridding is required to resolve the flow dynamics in the near-well regions. Strong grid orientation sensitivities can also contribute to the numerical errors and may require significant local grid refinement to alleviate. There are on-going R&D efforts on applying unstructured grids to better represent the near-well flow in reservoir simulation, but their applications are mainly in single-well study or sector modeling with a few wells. Some of the reasons cited for this include: (1) the lack of an effective, easy-to-use full-field complex well gridding tool; (2) the lack of supporting unstructured workflow for full-cycle reservoir simulation; (3) the cost of unstructured grid simulation; (4) the availability of post analysis and visualization tools for unstructured grid simulation.
The paper describes a method to generate unstructured grids which conform to complex well paths in field-scale simulation. The method uses a multi-level approach to place cells optimally within the solution domain based on the "regions of interests". The wellbore geometry is honored via the construction of a near-well grid that is complemented with multi-level quad-tree refinements to achieve the desired resolution in grid transition zones. The method includes an algorithm to remove small cells and pinching cells based on local grid quality measures and cell prioritization to honor well paths. The gridding process forms a component of a production level reservoir simulation workflow. The use of unstructured grid results in computational saving by placing cells where the resolution is needed. An in-house massively parallel simulator is used to run the unstructured grid models. Simulation examples for full-field applications with hundreds of complex wells using both structured grids and unstructured grids will be used to compare results, accuracy, and performance of the gridding method for reservoir simulation.
