Simulation of Gas Production from Multilayered Hydrate-Bearing Media with Fully Coupled Flow, Thermal, Chemical and Geomechanical Processes Using TOUGH+Millstone. Part 3: Production Simulation Results

Journal Article · Tue Apr 16 00:00:00 EDT 2019 · Transport in Porous Media

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-019-01283-1· OSTI ID:1580902

Reagan, Matthew T.  ^[1]; Queiruga, Alejandro F. ^[1]; Moridis, George J. ^[2]

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1. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
2. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Texas A & M Univ., College Station, TX (United States)

The TOUGH+Millstone simulator has been developed for the analysis of coupled flow, thermal and geomechanical processes associated with the formation and/or dissociation of CH_{4^-/sub>-hydrates in geological media. It is composed of two constituent codes: (a) a significantly enhanced version of the TOUGH+Hydrate simulator, v2.0, that accounts for all known flow, physical, thermodynamic and chemical processes associated with the evolution of hydrate-bearing systems and includes the most recent physical properties relationships, coupled seamlessly with (b) Millstone v1.0, a new code that addresses the conceptual, computational and mathematical shortcomings of earlier codes used to describe the geomechanical response of these systems. The capabilities of the TOUGH+Millstone code are demonstrated in the simulation and analysis of the system flow, thermal, and geomechanical behavior during gas production from a realistic complex offshore hydrate deposit. In the third paper of this series, we apply the simulators described in parts 1 and 2 to a problem of gas production from a complex, multilayered system of hydrate-bearing sediments in an oceanic environment. We perform flow simulations of constant-pressure production via a vertical well and compare those results to a coupled flow-geomechanical simulation of the same process. Finally, the results demonstrate the importance of fully coupled geomechanics when modeling the evolution of reservoir properties during production.}

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC); USDOE Office of Fossil Energy (FE)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231; AC03-76SF00098
• OSTI ID: 1580902
• Journal Information: Transport in Porous Media, Vol. 129, Issue 1; ISSN 0169-3913
• Publisher: Springer
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

58 GEOSCIENCES
Methane hydrates
Reservoir simulation
Geomechanics
Coupled processes