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Abstract

Summary

Reservoir models typically contain hundreds-of-thousands to millions of grid cells in which petrophysical properties such as porosity and permeability vary on a cell-to-cell basis. Moreover, the petrophysical properties and flow equations are discretized on the same grid. We investigate the impact of decoupling the grid used to model the petrophysical properties from that used to solve the flow equations. The aim is to test whether cell-tocell variability in petrophysical properties has a significant impact on fluid flow. We test the decoupling in two ways using a number of grid-based models. First, we keep the initial distribution of petrophysical properties, but solve flow equations on a finer grid. Second, we remove cell-to-cell variability to yield models containing just a few tens of unique porosity and permeability values grouped into a few hundred, internally homogeneous domains, but use the same initial grid to solve the flow equations. In both approaches, the flow behaviour of the original model is used as a reference. We find that the impact of cell-to-cell variability on predicted flow is small, and smaller than the error introduced by discretizing the flow equations on the same grid as the petrophysical properties. Cell-to-cell variability is not necessary to capture flow in reservoir models; rather, it is the spatially correlated variability in petrophysical properties that is important. Reservoir modelling effort should focus on capturing the geologic domains in the most realistic and computationally efficient manner.

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/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.201802204
2018-09-03
2024-04-27

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Impact Of Cell-To-Cell Scale Variability On Flow In Reservoir Models
Conference Proceedings 2018, 1 (2018); https://doi.org/10.3997/2214-4609.201802204
/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.201802204
/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.201802204
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