Numerical Modeling of Thermal EOR: Comprehensive Coupling of an AMR-Based Model of Thermal Fluid Flow and Geomechanics

Abstract

Modeling Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) can involve significant CPU (Central Processing Unit) time when both thermal fluid flow and geomechanics are coupled in order to take into account variations of permeability and porosity inside the reservoir due to stress changes. Here, a numerical procedure that performs thermo-hydro-mechanical simulations, in an efficient way, is presented. This procedure relies on an iterative coupling between a thermal reservoir simulator based on a finite volume method and a geomechanical one based on a finite element method. A strong feature of this procedure is that it allows handling the case when the reservoir simulations are performed using Adaptive Mesh Refinements (AMR). It thus provides an accurate description of the steam front evolution and allows taking geomechanical effects into account without performing the geomechanical simulations on a refined mesh. The efficiency of this coupling procedure is illustrated on a synthetic but realistic SAGD test case.