Published by the DTI Oil & Gas Directorate for the reservoir engineering and IOR community in the UK.
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Imperial College Consortium on Streamline-Based methods

Contact: Prof. Martin Blunt (m.blunt@ic.ac.uk)

In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the use of streamlines in reservoir engineering, with applications to upscaling, history matching, and as an alternative simulation method. In ideal circumstances these methods offer a revolutionary improvement in speed, resolution and accuracy over grid-based simulation approaches. However, at present the use of streamline methods in the oil industry is limited to a handful of research studies.

This consortium is aimed at developing and applying streamline methods to a variety of challenging field cases. Three applications will be studied: history matching, upscaling and the simulation of gas condensate systems. Time-of-flight information provides an elegant and simple method for determining the change in permeability in a reservoir model necessary for it to match production data. However, the methods developed so far assume incompressible flow without gravity, which is a poor approximation, especially for data from the early stages of production, where history matching is most useful. We will extend present theory to study compressible flow, including primary production and pressure transient analysis. For upscaling we will study the potential of using a simplified streamline simulation to compute averaged properties. The work will be performed in the context of the SPE comparative solution project for the 2001 Reservoir Simulation Symposium. Streamline methods decouple the one-dimensional solution along a streamline from the effects of heterogeneity and well placement. This makes them ideally suited to model displacements with complex phase behaviour, such as gas condensate systems, where rate-dependent properties are combined with significant compositional and pressure gradients. Streamline methods can model the correct sequence of fluid fronts as an aid to well test analysis and production design.

A fine-scale reservoir description and well locations (left) are used to describe a flow field. Fluid is transported along streamlines that follow the flow field (right). (Click for a larger image)

BUDGET: £15,000 per year per sponsors over three years. Currently supported by Enterprise, Shell, Phillips and the DTI.

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