Scale Up of Heterogeneous Three Dimensional Reservoir Descriptions

Abstract

Abstract A general method for the scale up of highly detailed, heterogeneous, three dimensional reservoir descriptions is developed and applied. The method entails the nonuniform coarsening of the original detailed description, with finer resolution introduced in regions of potentially high flow rate (as identified through computationally efficient single phase flow calculations) and coarser, homogenized property descriptions applied throughout the bulk of the model. The method is applied to the simulation of three actual reservoirs and is demonstrated to provide coarsened reservoir models which give simulation results in close agreement with those of the original fine scale description but at considerable computational savings (speedups of nearly two orders of magnitude). In addition, it is shown that the method can provide geologically realistic coarse scale reservoir descriptions, which can be subsequently history matched to field data via geologically sensible modifications.