Reservoir Simulation Joint Industry Project Center for Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (CPGE) The University of Texas at Austin

Overview

The objectives of this research project are the development, testing, verification and application of reservoir simulators for oil and gas recovery processes. The following research topics will be investigated in the project. The first two research topics are further development of an existing compositional chemical flooding simulator and further development of an existing equation-of-state compositional miscible gas flooding simulator. These simulators have been developed at The University of Texas at Austin to be used as test beds for new process physics, computational algorithms, and physical property models and other scientific purposes. Both simulators have features that are not available in commercial simulators such as ECLIPSE and VIP. The third topic is development of a new general purpose adaptive simulator (GPAS) designed for use on parallel supercomputers or clusters of PCs. The final topic is the application and benchmarking of parallel codes on clusters of PCs and massively parallel computers. We will base the level of activity on these topics on the funds available.

Principal Investigator: Kamy Sepehrnoori

• JIP supported by industrial sponsors
• Total funding of $210,000/year
• Research activities include
  • Development of an improved simulator for chemical and microbial IOR methods in both conventional and naturally fractured reservoirs
  • Development of a fully implicit, parallel chemical flooding simulator
  • Relative permeability studies
  • Interwell and single-well partitioning tracer studies
  • Modeling wettability alteration in naturally fractured reservoir
  • Reservoir simulation of CO2 and enriched-gas processes with three and four phase flow
  • Numerical studies of nitrogen injection in naturally fractured reservoirs
  • Development of more efficient gas flooding applicable to shallow reservoirs
  • CO₂ sequestration studies in oil reservoirs and saline aquifers
  • Modeling asphaltene precipitation
  • Cluster computing

Software

Please see the RSJIP software page for a list of available oil reservoir simulators.

Publications

Please see the RSJIP publication page for a list of selected publications.

Development and Application of UTCHEM Simulator

The objective of this research is to extend the capability of an existing chemical flood simulator (UTCHEM) to improve oil recovery and soil remediation methods that use surfactants, polymers, gels, tracers, alkaline chemicals, microorganisms and foam, as well as various combinations of these, in both conventional and naturally fractured oil reservoirs. Some applications of the UTCHEM simulator:

• Surfactant flooding
• High pH chemical flooding
• Polymer flooding
• Profile control
• Tracer tests
• Formation damage
• Soil remediation
• Microbial enhanced oil recovery
• Surfactant / foam
• Wettability alteration

Possible research topics include:

• Addition of numerical and coding enhancements to improve the versatility and performance of the code
• Enhancement of the physical property models in the simulator
• Further development of a user friendly graphical user interface (GUI) to set up the input and process output files
• Wettability alteration modeling in naturally fractured reservoirs
• Relative permeability studies
• Advanced Interwell and single well partitioning tracer studies such as the use of natural tracers
• Development of a framework to optimize chemical floods using the concept of experimental design

Development and Application of UTCOMP Simulator

The objective of this research is to extend the capability of an existing compositional equation-of-state simulator (UTCOMP). Possible topics include:

• CO₂ Sequestration in deep saline aquifer and oil reservoirs
• Gas condensate reservoir studies
• Mobility control using foam
• Asphaltene precipitation
• Improvement on the flash calculation
• Improvement in relative permeability and capillary pressure relationships
• More general gridding
• Development of a user friendly graphical user interface (GUI) to set up the input, make the run and process output files
• Improving the robustness and speed of the solver used to solve the systems of linear equations used in the simulator
  

Development of General Purpose Adaptive Simulator

The objective of this research is to develop a general purpose adaptive simulator (GPAS) for parallel supercomputers and clusters of PCs. The simulator is designed to perform accurate, efficient high-resolution simulation of fluid flow in permeable media for large complex problems. Although the initial code development will be for a compositional miscible gas flooding process, the long term goal is to include black oil, chemical and thermal models for simulating oil recovery in both conventional and naturally fractured reservoirs. An important aspect of this project is development of a simulator capable of simulating multi-million gridblock problems in overnight runs.

Cluster Computing

The objective of this research is to demonstrate the applicability of clusters of PCs for solving large-scale reservoir simulation problems. A specialized laboratory for parallel computing has been established to support parallel computational research. Through a hardware grant from the Intel Corporation, CPGE has acquired three clusters of PCs. One cluster consists of sixteen 300 MHz Pentium II processors. Each processor has 384MB of memory, for a total of 6 GB of memory across the cluster. The second cluster consists of eight nodes, each with two 400 MHz Intel Pentium II Xeon processors with 512 MB of memory. The third cluster consists of sixteen 1 GHz processors. The operating system is Linux, a Unix-like operating system, which lets us transparently port our simulators to the clusters from traditional parallel computers running Unix. These computer facilities will be used to support computational activities in this project. Possible topics include:

• Benchmark of parallel codes on cluster of PCs with single processors
• Benchmark of parallel codes on cluster of PCs with SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processors)
• Benchmark of PC clusters and massively parallel processors such as IBM SP

Researchers

• Mojdeh Delshad, delshad@mail.utexas.edu
• Choongyong Han, cyhan@mail.utexas.edu
• Gary. A. Pope, gpope@mail.utexas.edu
• Kamy Sepehrnoori, kamys@mail.utexas.edu

How to Join

To become a sponsor of the Reservoir Simulation Joint Industry Project, please contact Dr. Kamy Sephernoori to receive a copy of the research participation agreement to be executed by your company and The University of Texas. The membership fee for the project is USD $40,000 per year. As with all University Industrial Affiliates programs, intellectual property rights cannot be granted, and no specific reporting requirements may be imposed. However, we will host an annual workshop and provide papers, student theses, and reports of our research accomplishments resulting from the project. You can contact us by mail, phone, fax, or e-mail as follows:

Dr. Kamy Sepehrnoori
Center for Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station C0304
Austin, Texas 78712-0228
Phone: (512) 471-0231 FAX: (512) 471-9678
Email: kamys@mail.utexas.edu

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URL: http://www.cpge.utexas.edu/rsjip/
Page maintained by Joanna L. Castillo (jlc@mail.utexas.edu)