Anschutz Ranch East is a major rich gas condensate field located in the Western Overthrust Belt on the Wyoming-Utah border. The plan-of-depletion for the field involves injection of nitrogen to maintain reservoir pressure above the dew point of the in-place fluid.

Reservoir simulators were an essential tool in development of the Anschutz Ranch East plan of depletion. The fluid complexity dictated that a compositional simulator be employed which uses an equation of state. The preliminary simulation work was performed using a symmetry element, since data were initially very limited. As additional data became available, simulation efforts were directed towards modeling the entire field.

This paper discusses both the fieldwide and symmetry element simulations. The symmetry element approach was found to be adequate for comparison of various depletion schemes. Its limitations when extrapolating performance to the full field were identified. The performance of fieldwide simulations requiring up to 3.75 million words of storage was found to be efficient on scalar hardware.

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