Compositional Streamline Simulation: A Parallel Implementation

Abstract

Compositional reservoir simulators are needed to model oil recovery from petroleum reservoirs by miscible gas injection. This article describes the development and application of a parallel version of a compositional streamline simulator. A compositional streamline module is developed and integrated with an existing finite-difference simulator. Finitedifference calculations including pressure solution are performed on a single processor. The movement of fluids (which includes streamline tracing, mappings, flux calculations, and one-dimensional solver) is done along streamlines in the streamline module. The streamline module is parallelized by distributing streamlines among different processors because computations along any streamline are independent of other streamlines and no communication is required. Flux calculation along streamlines is computationally expensive primarily due to flash calculations that are performed to distribute components among the hydrocarbon phases. Simultaneous solution of this time-consuming step results in reduction of total CPU time. Communication (gathering) across the streamlines or processors is achieved by using message passing interface (MPI). Test runs are conducted for different examples to investigate the performance of the parallel streamline simulator. Results indicate that significant reduction in CPU time can be obtained by distributing streamlines on different processors.

Operator splitting technique using streamline projection for two-phase flow in highly heterogeneous and anisotropic porous media

“…We are interested in validating our method in terms of front propagation, and therefore we consider a simplified version of the original SPE10 Benchmark problem. Here, we simulate a flow driven by a pressure gradient, i.e., we impose Dirichlet boundary condition on the following sets: (10). Initially, the domain is filled by the non-wetting phase.…”

“…A streamline tracer algorithm combined with two-phase flow in porous media on decomposed domain is a novelty. In [10], the authors, proposed an algorithm based on distributed-memory to assign to different processes a part of the streamline set. Thus, this approach does not require any communication between processes for calculating the streamlines.…”

A prediction formula for ratio of injection–production control area in triangle well pattern

“…Siavashi et al (2016) used streamline-based simulation to obtain the injection-production control area, which is also called sweep region, to reflect the development performance of waterflooding reservoir. However, this method calls for a long time to build and calculate the streamline model, making itself time-consuming work (Stenerud et al 2008;Bhambri and Mohanty 2011). Besides, considering the available parameters and expense, not all waterflooding reservoirs have the ability to conduct the streamline numerical simulation.…”