Development of a Standalone Compositional Simulator for Modelling Multiphase Flow and Temperature Distribution Along Wellbore
Date
2019-12
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Abstract
Well modeling of multiphase flow and temperature flow along a wellbore has wide applications in the petroleum industry especially in unconventional oil and gas recovery processes. Also, wellbore modeling can be applied in a geothermal well for optimizing production parameters. The main research works completed in this study include building mathematical equations for wellbore modeling and development of a standalone wellbore simulator. At first, a series of mathematical equations are built for wellbore modeling of fluid flow in tubing or annulus, heat loss to a surrounding formation and heat transfer in the formation. Then methods and workflows are determined for key steps in wellbore simulator development including discretization, a grid system, a solution method and a liner equation solver. A standalone compositional wellbore simulator is developed. Validation works against CMG SAM, CMG Flexwell and Eclipse Multi-Segment Well are conducted afterwards. Different scenarios have been modeled by the wellbore simulator that include hot water injection, steam injection, SAGD circulation, SAGD injection, multiphase well production, steam-solvent co-injection, liquid CO2 injection for a shale gas reservoir and geothermal well production. Different well trajectories and structures are handled such as vertical, deviated and horizontal wells, and the wells consisted of one or dual tubing strings. New correlations for more accurate heat loss calculations are regressed in this study based on CFD Fluent simulation and they can better estimate the convection heat transfer in annuli space with single tubing or dual-tubing strings. Also, a semi-numerical method and a fully numerical method for heat loss calculations are proposed. The semi-numerical method consists of heat loss through wellbore components calculated by correlations and heat loss in a surrounding formation numerically simulated, and the fully numerical method performs simulation for heat transfer both in wellbore components and the surrounding formation.
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Thermal Wellbore Modeling Simulation
Citation
Xiong, W. (2019). Development of a Standalone Compositional Simulator for Modelling Multiphase Flow and Temperature Distribution Along Wellbore (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.