A Coupled Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical modelling of Oil Reservoirs

the porosity and permeability of the rock as well as changes in reservoir pressure; affect the efficiency of reservoir. On the other hand, in the most cases of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) injection, the temperature of injected fluid is different from the reservoir temperature. This temperature difference through change in fluid properties will affect pressure distribution in the environment. Therefore in order to optimize the operation and study the behavior of reservoir, coupled Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical (THM) simulation is necessary. In this study, coupled THM simulation has been carried out using ABAQUS and ECLIPSE software coupling. Reservoirs coupled study showed that the rate of production in the coupled THM simulation is more than the uncoupled one and reservoir porosity and permeability variations in the coupled THM simulation are different from the coupled HM simulation. In oil field development, reservoir simulation is applied to accurately predict and analyze fluid flow during production and injection. A variety of problems arising from petroleum engineering inherently necessitate the understanding of interactions between fluid flow, heat transfer and solid mechanics. For computing such processes numerically on the respective relevant scales, stress-strain relationships resulting from fluid pressure and temperature have to be computed and coupled to the regional flow and transport regime dynamically. This paper deals with the implementation of a program (FORTRAN90 interface code), which was developed to couple conventional reservoir (ECLIPSE) and geomechanical (ABAQUS) simulators, using a partial coupling algorithm for coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) processes in multiphase reservoir modeling. A geomechanics reservoir partially coupled approach is presented that allows taking the impact of geomechanics into account in the fluid flow calculations and therefore performs a better prediction of the process. Time dependent reservoir pressure fields obtained from three dimensional compositional reservoir models were transferred into finite element reservoir geomechanical models in ABAQUS as multi-phase flow in deforming reservoirs cannot be performed within ABAQUS. Finally, the proposed approach is illustrated on a complex coupled problems related to injection of carbon dioxide in an oil reservoir. Reservoirs coupled study showed that the rate of production in the coupled THM simulation is more than the uncoupled one and reservoir porosity and permeability variations in the coupled THM simulation are different from the coupled HM simulation.

کلیدواژه ها:

Pore Pressure ، Effective Stress ، Porosity ، Permeability ، Enhanced Oil Recovery ، Coupled Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical