ITF Project on Improved Simulation of Fractured Reservoirs at Imperial College

The ITF project is concerned with the development of new methods for improved simulation and characterization of fractured and faulted reservoirs.

For field-scale simulations, a novel method of fractured-reservoir recovery is being researched and implemented in 3DSL, a commercially available streamline-based reservoir simulator: Geologically realistic models of a range of common fault- and fracture geometries will serve to compute appropriate recovery-upscaling parameters.

Present reservoir simulation studies of fractured and faulted reservoirs suffer from a number of limitations, meaning that there is little confidence in their predictions of oil recovery. Since the range of possible recoveries is so wide, improved oil recovery projects, particularly in mature and small accumulations, are very risky.

This project will develop novel and improved methods for simulating flow in fractured and faulted reservoirs. The result will be better predictions of oil recovery with less uncertainty. This will allow gas and/or water injection projects to be designed with confidence, resulting in better recoveries from fractured reservoirs. The results will be delivered to the industry as a wide variety of deliverables: A pioneered object-oriented software design concept for FEM-FV fractured reservoir simulation documented in the unified modeling language (UML), the knowledge about the suitability of public-domain algorithms for the specific reservoir simulation problem, the novel reservoir discretization tools of ICEM CFD Technologies Inc., the commercial code of Streamsim Technologies Inc., and the rigorously determined mathematical model for recovery upscaling for use in current conventional reservoir simulators.

For more information see here.

Improved Simulation of Fractured Reservoirs