IORSim: A Mathematical Workflow for Field-Scale Geochemistry Simulations in Porous Media

Abstract

Reservoir modeling consists of two key components: the reproduction of the historical performance and the prediction of the future reservoir performance. Industry-standard reservoir simulators must run fast on enormous and possibly unstructured grids while yet guaranteeing a reasonable representation of physical and chemical processes. However, computational demands limit simulators in capturing involved physical and geochemical mechanisms, especially when chemical reactions interfere with reservoir flow. This paper presents a mathematical workflow, implemented in IORSim, that makes it possible to add geochemical calculations to porous media flow simulators without access to the source code of the original host simulator. An industry-standard reservoir simulator calculates velocity fields of the fluid phases (e.g., water, oil, and gas), while IORSim calculates the transport and reaction of geochemical components. Depending on the simulation mode, the geochemical solver estimates updated relative and/or capillary pressure curves to modify the global fluid flow. As one of the key innovations of the coupling mechanism, IORSim uses a sorting algorithm to permute the grid cells along flow directions. Instead of solving an over-dimensionalized global matrix calling a Newton–Raphson solver, the geochemical software tool treats the species balance as a set of local nonlinear problems. Moreover, IORSim applies basis swapping and splay tree techniques to accelerate geochemical computations in complex full-field reservoir models. The presented work introduces the mathematical IORSim concept, verifies the chemical species advection, and demonstrates the IORSim computation efficiency. After validating the geochemical solver against reference software, IORSim is used to investigate the impact of seawater injection on the NCS Ekofisk reservoir chemistry.