Development and application of a new upscaling technique
- and others
Detailed reservoir descriptions have become available with the advent of geostatistical conditional simulation and geological-engineering reservoir characterization techniques which can honor and integrate information such as core, well log, well test, geological and geophysical data. Prohibitive computational costs of flow simulations with such detail limit us to coarse grid systems. Of all the reservoir properties, permeability has the foremost effect on fluid flow. Therefore a procedure to properly scale-up small scale permeabilities to a permeability of a large scale coarse grid is needed. This paper presents an extension of the new 3-D absolute permeability analytical upscaling method by incorporating 3-D directional search and coordinate rotation procedures. The method for single-phase upscaling is applied to realistic 3-D reservoir heterogeneities and Glenn Pool Self Unit flow simulations and excellent agreement is obtained between fine and upscaled coarse grid simulations. The paper also presents the extension of the method to relative permeability upscaling. Based on phase permeabilities, a theory of analytical upscaling for waterflooding has been developed. The method assumes steady-state flow under capillary-viscous equilibrium and calculates effective relative permeability tensors based on phase permeabilities as a function of water saturation. The preliminary results of the new two-phase analytical upscaling method in 2-D are compared with numerical results and a promising match is obtained. The new method may present a viable alternative to numerical upscaling.
- OSTI ID:
- 199437
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-951002--
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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