Simulation of Radio Frequency Heating of Heavy Oil Reservoir Using Multi-Physics Coupling of Reservoir Simulation with Electromagnetic Solver

Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) is one of the popular methods for heavy oil production. The process is efficient and economical. However, it requires the use of large quantity of water and disposal of waste water can be costly. In addition, burning of natural gas for steam generation contributes to additional carbon dioxide generation, a known greenhouse gas, which is also undesirable. A method to heat up the in-situ oil without the use of injected water is highly desirable. Radio frequency (RF) heating of heavy oil reservoir is a potential method for oil recovery without steam injection. The evaluation of the potential of such method requires the coupling of a reservoir simulator with an electromagnetic (EM) simulator. This paper describes the development and implementation of a flexible interface in a reservoir simulator that allows the runtime loading of third party software libraries with additional physics. Data is exchanged between the reservoir simulator and externally loaded software libraries through memory, therefore there is minimal communication overhead. The implementation allows for iterative coupling, explicit coupling and periodic coupling. This paper describes the mathematical coupling of the mass and energy conservation equations in the reservoir simulator with the Maxwell equations in an external library. The electromagnetic properties in the reservoir are highly dependent on temperature and water saturation, this dependence is accounted for in the coupled code using table look-up properties. Canadian heavy oil and reservoir properties were used in our simulation investigation. We found that RF heating alone can be effective in heating up the in-situ water and reducing heavy oil viscosity by several orders of magnitude. As the in-situ water near wellbore was vaporized by RF heating, electrical conductivities were reduced to zero and thus allowed the EM wave to propagate further into the formation and heat up the water further away from the wellbore. With properly designed RF heating field pilots and tuning of EM and reservoir parameters, the coupled reservoir/EM simulator can be a powerful tool for the evaluation and optimization of RF heating operations. The interface is sufficiently flexible to allow different types of multi-physics coupling. In addition to RF heating, it has also been used for reaction kinetics and geomechanics coupling with a reservoir simulator. It has been used for large scale coupled full field simulation with over 30 million cells.