An Improved Methodology for Gridding Fractured Reservoirs for Simulation

Abstract

A significant amount of research for gridding of complex reservoirs, including models with fractures, has focused on use of unstructured grids. While models with unstructured grids can be extremely flexible, they can also be expensive, both in configuring, computationally, and visual display. Even with this focus on unstructured grids, most reservoir simulation models are still built on structured grids. Current methods for creating reservoir simulation models with structured grids often involve defining a base grid upfront and then "somehow" inserting one or more Features of Interest (FOI's) into the model. Applied to fractured horizontal wells with many stages it can be extremely difficult to accurately align wells and completions within a pre-existing simulation grid. This work describes and demonstrates a methodology to resolve such issues. This approach changes the order of model design and creation steps. This paper describes the process where FOI's are identified, a base grid is designed around the FOI's, then local grid refinements (LGR's) are defined as desired. Applied to a horizontal well with fractures, the well and completion locations are defined before the detailed grid definition is created. This process is illustrated for generalized FOI's, and then applied to fractured horizontal wells. Formulas for creation of models for wells with evenly space homogeneous completions are presented. Numerical testing and analyses are presented that show the impact of the gridding parameters and various design parameters on performance of reservoir simulations.