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Pau Pau Pau Pau: Pierre Samier Total

This document summarizes a presentation on reservoir simulation in the oil industry. Reservoir simulators numerically model subsurface fluid flow to manage hydrocarbon production under different scenarios. Major oil companies like Total use commercial simulators from Schlumberger, CMG, Halliburton, BEICIP, and Petex, as well as developing internal simulators. Universities also develop research simulators. The talk focuses on trends in reservoir simulation, including parallel architectures, new discretization methods, implicit solutions, unstructured grids, complex well modeling, thermal and EOR processes, and coupling with other models.

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Obi Mogbo
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110 views4 pages

Pau Pau Pau Pau: Pierre Samier Total

This document summarizes a presentation on reservoir simulation in the oil industry. Reservoir simulators numerically model subsurface fluid flow to manage hydrocarbon production under different scenarios. Major oil companies like Total use commercial simulators from Schlumberger, CMG, Halliburton, BEICIP, and Petex, as well as developing internal simulators. Universities also develop research simulators. The talk focuses on trends in reservoir simulation, including parallel architectures, new discretization methods, implicit solutions, unstructured grids, complex well modeling, thermal and EOR processes, and coupling with other models.

Uploaded by

Obi Mogbo
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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MAMERN'09: 3rd International Conference on Approximation Methods and numerical

Modeling in Environment and Natural Resources June 8-11, 2009 Pau - France

http://lma.univ-pau.fr/meet/mamern09/ contact: [email protected] Invited Speaker

Pierre Samier Total Expoloration Production Pau, France email:

[email protected] Title:

Reservoir Simulation in the Oil Industry Abstract:

In order to manage and optimize hydrocarbon production, oil companies need to model

oil and gas recovery under different production scenarios. To achieve this goal, reservoir

simulators are applied. These simulators numerically model the subsurface flow of oil,

water and gas. TOTAL, like other oil companies, carries out extensive reservoir studies

based on numerical reservoir simulation. More than 160 engineers in Pau, Paris and

subsidiaries are involved in this activity, typically using industrial simulators developed

by Schlumberger (ECLIPSE) or Computer Modeling Group (STARS) or Halliburton

(NEXUS) or BEICIP (PUMAFLOW) or Petroleum Experts (REVEAL). In parallel with

commercial software, universities (Department of Energy Resource Engineering at

Stanford University, Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, Department

of Petroleum Engineering at Austin, Mining Institute at Loeben) develop research

simulators such as GPRS, GPAS, UTCHEM, IPARS, SURE. The interest of these

research codes is to test new numerical techniques, new programming techniques, new

solvers which if successful will be integrated in commercial simulators. Apart from these

two classes of software, major oil companies prefer to maintain an internal expertise in

developing in-house reservoir simulators such as EMpower (Exxomobil), MORES


(Shell), POWERS (Saudi Aramco), PSIM (ConocoPhillips) and CHEARS

(ChevronTexaco). The objective of these internal codes is to keep expertise in software

development inside the oil company, to be able to implement rapidly results of internal

research, to adapt rapidly the internal simulator to a specific case study. Total, in

association with Schlumberger & ChevronTexaco, participates in the development of

INTERSECT, a new generation reservoir simulator. The major trends and research topics

in reservoir simulation are:

- parallel architecture - use of new solvers such as algebraic multigrid linear solution

techniques, - new type of discretization (mixed finite elements, MPFA, …),

- new degree of solution implicitness, - unstructured grids (which are useful for resolving

complex geological features) associated to Voronoi types of meshes, Pebi-grid, …

- new physics (thermal simulation, polymer, electrical heating, steam injection, CO2

injection, ..)

- coupling techniques (integration of the pipeline network, coupling with conform

nonlinear finite element software used in rock mechanics, coupling with a chemical

software, coupling with a fluid process software )

- integration of reservoir simulation in workflow in order to history match the previous

production and the previous field measurements (pressures, flow rates, 4D seismic, …)

- use of new techniques such as the Ensemble Kalman filter for history matching

- use of optimization techniques (adjoint method, global optimization, …) for optimizing

the production scenario and the global oil recovery.


- use of multi-scale approach to reduce the computational times - use of uncertainty

approach, stochastic techniques, proxies, experimental design to integrate the uncertainty

of the petrophysical properties inside the reservoir model

- modeling complex multi-segmented wells (also called intelligent wells) which require a

specific numerical well model accounting for wellbore friction effects and an

optimization tool to set the various valves rates.

- streamlines techniques in order to transfer the resolution of fully 3D transport equations

along a bench of 1D streamtubes.

- Fractured reservoirs and dual porosity transport equation

Among all these research topics, Total is particularly interested in focusing on

thermal recovery processes (steam flood, cycling injection, Steam Assisted Gravity

Drainage) and

Enhanced Oil Recovery techniques (Alcali-Surfactant-Polymer, ..) where the supply in

terms of commercial software is weak The practical issue is the development of heavy oil

fields and the improvement of oil recovery. It is important to accurately simulate these

processes in order to optimize their deployment and operation. In thermal reservoir

simulators, an equation of energy conservation is added to the usual set of mass

conservation equations solved in classical reservoir simulations. This requires adapting

the numerical schemes and algorithms classically used for isothermal problems. The

challenge is to obtain accurate solutions with fast computation times. Also, strong

variations of thermal properties create thermal fronts and some research is devoted to

adaptative meshing with dynamic refinement. Moreover these two directions of research:
new physics and new discretization techniques, the integration of efficient solvers

combined with suitable hardware is a crucial task to speed up the simulation times

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