Effective Local-Global Upscaling of Fractured Reservoirs under Discrete Fractured Discretization

Junchao Li, Zhengdong Lei, Guan Qin and Bin Gong
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Junchao Li: Department of Energy & Resources Engineering, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Zhengdong Lei: Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration and Development, PetroChina, Beijing 100083, China
Guan Qin: Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77004, USA
Bin Gong: Department of Energy & Resources Engineering, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

Energies, 2015, vol. 8, issue 9, 1-20

Abstract: The subsurface flow in fractured reservoirs is strongly affected by the distribution of fracture networks. Discrete fracture models, which represent all fractures individually by unstructured grid systems, are thus developed and act as a more accurate way for fractured reservoir simulation. However, it is usually not realistic to directly apply discrete fracture models to simulate field scale models for efficiency reasons. There is a need for upscaling techniques to coarsen the high resolution fracture descriptions to sizes that can be accommodated by reservoir simulators. In this paper, we extended the adaptive local-global upscaling technique to construct a transmissibility-based dual-porosity dual-permeability model from discrete fracture characterizations. An underlying unstructured fine-scale grid is firstly generated as a base grid. A global coarse-scale simulation is performed to provide boundary conditions for local regions and local upscaling procedures are carried out in every local region for transmissibility calculations. Iterations are performed until the consistency between the global and local properties is achieved. The procedure is applied to provide dual-porosity dual-permeability (DPDK) parameters including coarse-scale matrix-matrix, fracture-fracture and matrix-fracture flux transmissibilities. The methodology is applied to several cases. The simulation results demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency and robustness of the proposed method.

Keywords: fractured reservoir; upscaling; discrete-fracture models (DFMs); DPDK; reservoir simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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