Reservoir geomechanics is a production induced phenomena that is experienced
in large number of fields around the world. Hydrocarbon production changes the pore
pressure which in turn alters the in-situ stress state. For reservoirs that are either stress
sensitive or where rock is soft and unconsolidated, stresses have appreciable effect on
rock properties like porosity and permeability. Anisotropic and isotropic permeability
changes affect flow direction and movement of flood front thereby influencing well
performance and reservoir productivity. Coupling of geomechanical calculation with
multi-phase flow calculation is needed to make prudent predictions about the reservoir
production and recovery. The post processing tools provided with the simulators cannot
monitor flood front movement and fail to capture important information like flow
directionality and dominant phase in a flow. Geomechanical simulation is combined with
streamline tracing to aid in better understanding of the reservoir dynamics through
visualization of flow patterns in the reservoir. Streamline tracing is a proved reservoir
engineering tool that is widely used by industry experts to capture information on flood
movement, injector-producer relations and swept area. In the present research, we have incorporated total velocity streamlines and phase
streamlines for coupled geomechanical simulation and compared the results with
streamline tracing for conventional reservoir simulator to explain geomechanics behavior
on reservoir flow processes in a more detailed and appealing manner. Industry standard
simulators are used for coupled geomechanical simulation and conventional simulation
and streamline tracing has been done through in-house tracing code.
The research demonstrates the benefits and power of streamline tracing in
visualizing flow patterns through work on two cases; first, a synthetic case for studying
water injection in a five spot pattern and second, a SPE 9th comparative study. The
research gives encouraging results by showing how geomechanics influences reservoir
flow paths and reservoir dynamics through visualization of flow. The streamlines
captures flow directionality, information regarding appearance and disappearance of gas
phase and the connectivity between injector and producer.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-3221 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Parihar, Prannay |
| Contributors | Datta-Gupta, Akhil |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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