Background and objectives
Detailed fracture modeling creates higher demands for improved fluid flow simulation. The project will develop a prototype reservoir simulator that can simulate fluid flow with industry acceptable accuracy directly on a detailed and complex geological model including detailed fracture modeling. The simulator should perform these simulations with higher computational efficiency than what is possible with fully implicit simulators. This will make it possible to simulate directly on geological models that has up to 100 million grid cells in less than 15 hours using a single state-of-the-art (at the end of the project) Windows-based PC.
This will be achieved by:
- Developing a multiscale mixed finite-element code for corner-point geometry and implementing this code into the streamline reservoir simulator FrontSim.
- Developing a computational method to ensure unconditional stability of a streamline method regardless of time-step length.
- Developing a multiscale mixed finite-element code for corner-point geometry and fractured reservoirs and implementing this code into the streamline simulator FrontSim.
- Develop a parallel capability for FrontSim.
- Perform extensive testing and verification of each of the points above against state-of-the-art and industry standard simulation tools.
Project outcome
We developed a multiscale pressure solver in ECLIPSE FrontSim, which was the first successful implementation of multiscale technology inside a commercial simulator.
The project also layed the foundations of a continued collaboration with SLB that eventually would lead to the development the INTERSECT multiscale sequential fully implicit simulator.
