A Parallel Reservoir Simulator for Large-Scale Reservoir Simulation

Abstract

Summary A new parallel, black-oil-production reservoir simulator (Powers**) has been developed and fully integrated into the pre- and post-processing graphical environment. Its primary use is to simulate the giant oil and gas reservoirs of the Middle East using millions of cells. The new simulator has been created for parallelism and scalability, with the aim of making megacell simulation a day-to-day reservoir-management tool. Upon its completion, the parallel simulator was validated against published benchmark problems and other industrial simulators. Several giant oil-reservoir studies have been conducted with million-cell descriptions. This paper presents the model formulation, parallel linear solver, parallel locally refined grids, and parallel well management. The benefits of using megacell simulation models are illustrated by a real field example used to confirm bypassed oil zones and obtain a history match in a short time period. With the new technology, preprocessing, construction, running, and postprocessing of megacell models is finally practical. A typical history-match run for a field with 30 to 50 years of production takes only a few hours.