A Sequential Thermal Simulator with Streamline for Heavy Oil Recovery Simulation
This paper presents a sequential approach to heavy oil recovery simulation. The approach uses a mixed finitedifference method to solve mass conservation equations and a streamline-based technique to solve energy conservation equation. A streamline heat transport model was formulated for compressible and non-isothermal flow where the changes in the fluid properties with pressure and temperature along streamlines are honored. The derived model was used to calculate temperature in the sequential step within the simulator. With the temperature calculations along the streamlines, relatively large time-steps can be applied and the effect of spatial numerical dispersion is mitigated. This sequential approach was tested through simulation of heavy oil recovery by means of hot waterflooding in two- dimensional homogeneous and heterogeneous reservoirs which have undergone cold water injection. In all the tested cases, water at initial conditions is more mobile than oil, which leads to unfavorable displacement. The results were verified with those of a commercial fully implicit thermal simulator. The tested cases showed that the combination of the grid- based and the streamline-based methods is promising to simulate heavy oil recovery processes within practical time while retaining detailed physical model.
USMAN N. ARIHARA
Waseda University, Japan
国际会议
首届世界重油大会(The Technical Sessions of the First World Heavy Oil Conference)
北京
英文
411-418
2006-11-12（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）