Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Fluid flow in porous media can be generally categorized into four technical areas: single phase flow in homogeneous reservoir, multiphase flow in homogeneous reservoir, single phase flow in heterogeneous reservoir, and multiphase flow in heterogeneous reservoir. In the technical domain of transient pressure and rate analyses, although extensive research and engineering work have been conducted in these four areas, the majority of the outcomes were done for the first two technical areas. There were not many technical solutions for single and multiphase fluid flow in heterogeneous reservoir in a relative strict sense; this is mainly due to the complexity of fluid flow in formation with heterogeneity. Our recent research work has successfully built single-phase flow model for 2D/3D heterogeneous reservoir using rigorous semi-analytical methodology. The outstanding advantage of the new methodology is the highly accurate results generated for the entire reservoir domain with 2D/3D geometry. Using this methodology, different types of wells and reservoir heterogeneity features can be integrated into the model and the well pressure and production responses can be simulated and analyzed accordingly. The new research outcome has greatly enhanced petroleum engineers' technical position in terms of understanding, analyzing and managing the real reservoir performance. To take the full advantage of our current technical status, the newly proposed research will explore further into the area of multiphase fluid flow in heterogeneous reservoir. The concepts of pseudo-pressure and moving front will be studied and the multiphase flowing system will be coupled and solved using semi-analytical methodology. Extensive comparison work will be conducted to verify whether semi-analytical methodology can successfully worked out this technical challenge. The major technical effort in the computing aspect will be conducted through implementing parallel computing, or high performance computing (HPC). Once succeed, petroleum professionals in Canada and worldwide will be able to deal with reservoir modeling more close to reality and largely benefit from it, thus its application will be tremendous.