Al-Zainaldin, S, Glover, PWJ orcid.org/0000-0003-1715-5474 and Lorinczi, P (2017) Synthetic Fractal Modelling of Heterogeneous and Anisotropic Reservoirs for use in Simulation Studies: Implications on their Hydrocarbon Recovery Prediction. Transport in Porous Media, 116 (1). pp. 181-212. ISSN 0169-3913
Abstract
Optimising production from heterogeneous and anisotropic reservoirs challenges the modern hydrocarbon industry because such reservoirs exhibit extreme inter-well variability making them very hard to model. Reasonable reservoir models can be obtained using modern statistical techniques, but all of them rely on significant variability in the reservoir only occurring at a scale at or larger than the inter-well spacing. In this paper we take a different, generic, approach. We have developed a method for constructing realistic synthetic heterogeneous and anisotropic reservoirs which can be made to represent the reservoir under test. The main physical properties of these synthetic reservoirs are distributed fractally. The models are fully controlled and reproducible and can be extended to model multiple facies reservoir types. This paper shows how the models can be constructed and how they have been tested. Varying the fractal dimension and anisotropy factor of each of these physical properties can tell us how sensitive the reservoir is to uncertainties in its heterogeneity and anisotropy as well as how poroperm cross-plot shapes are controlled. Initial reservoir simulation results of the tested models with this approach show that heterogeneity in the reservoir's physical parameters has a little effect on high and moderate porosity and permeability reservoirs. The effect is more pronounced in the models representing tight reservoirs. The production from more heterogeneous reservoirs lasts a little longer, but eventually declines faster. This may be attributed to the fact that water channelling is more significant as heterogeneity increases.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
Keywords: | Fractal; Heterogeneous; anisotropic; Reservoir; Hydrocarbons; Simulation; Modelling |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Institute for Applied Geosciences (IAG) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 11 Oct 2016 13:31 |
Last Modified: | 04 Jun 2019 09:23 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-016-0770-3 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Verlag |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s11242-016-0770-3 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:105497 |