Scale Up of Pore Level Flow Properties; Application in Wellbore Modelling Containing Inflow Control Devices
Date
2021-08-31
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Abstract
Prediction of reservoir production using different technical scenarios and designs is essential for optimization of a reservoir development plan. Due to the scale of a reservoir, simulators use simplified discretized equations to predict the production and other properties of the reservoir. Therefore, they cannot observe complicated physical phenomena that occur at the pore scale. Such phenomena have a significant effect on the relative permeability of the fluids which is an important factor for predicting multiphase flow behavior at the reservoir scale. Commercial reservoir simulator software use correlations to calculate relative permeability of the fluids. Even though such method is proven practical for conventional reservoirs, it is not accurate for unconventional and tight reservoirs if not calibrated and matched using SCAL data and can lead to erroneous predictions. The objective of this research is to calculate the single-phase and immiscible two-phase flow properties including porosity, permeability, capillary pressure, and relative permeability using random-network modelling technique at the pore scale and then scale up the results to macro scale, and core scale using analytical and numerical methods available in the literature and develop new scale up methods when the current methods prove to be inaccurate. The scaled-up flow properties are then used to construct a comprehensive near well bore model with complex well completion setups which contain tubing-deployed and liner-deployed flow control devices (FCDs). The effect of various completion designs such as open-hole, single and parallel tubing, liner-deployed FCD, and retrofitted tubing-deployed FCD setups in conjunction with the scaled-up flow properties obtained from pore level modelling is incorporated in a comprehensive software package. The application of the coupled scaled-up micro-scale simulation and near well bore modelling is illustrated in two aspects: Control of gas coning in horizontal wells with tubing deployed FCDs and application of PNM in simulation of black oil reservoirs. Control of gas coning in horizontal wells using tubing deployed FCDs is studied and the scaled-up relative permeability curves were incorporated during simulation. In this study, a new formulation is also developed to capture the phase-change normal to the well. In this model a modified version of boundary-element-method (BEM) is implemented, and the pressure is used as a tracer and all the properties such as saturation and mobility variation are calculated normal to the well bore. This is a new semi-analytical method where all the integration terms are calculated numerically. Application of PNM and its corresponding scaled-up results in near well bore simulation is also studied. We explain the variability of pore structure on its relative-permeability and capillary pressure curves, and for a similar formation and identical permeability how other factors can vary the characteristic curves. By using a boundary-element-method we also incorporate such variations into well/reservoir interaction. As a result of such modelling one may evaluate the performance of the well on different gas cresting/coning scenarios. The results show that such variability in the pore network has less than 10% on production gas rates, but its effect on oil production can be extensive. The results of such work show the importance of PNM in well completion design and probabilistic analysis of the performance and can be extended on different factors of the reservoir in the future works.
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Keywords
engineering, simulation, modelling, analytical, numerical, network model, network modelling, pore scale modeling, scale up, relative permeability, capillary pressure, production, optimization, sensitivity analysis, porosity, permeability, macro scale, core scale, reservoir scale, scale-up, up scaling, statistical, neural network, gas coning, gas cresting, boundary element, BEM, Eushaw Dynamic Simulator, petroleum engineering, reservoir engineering, reservoir model, reservoir modeling, FCD, ICD, Inflow Control Device, Flow Control Device, wellbore modelling, nodal analysis, IPR, inflow productivity relationship
Citation
Bashtani, F. (2021). Scale Up of Pore Level Flow Properties; Application in Wellbore Modelling Containing Inflow Control Devices (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.