Coupled Facility and Reservoir Simulations to Optimize Strategies for a Mature Field

Abstract

It is important to employ a good production injection strategy to optimize hydrocarbon recovery from a field. Reservoir constraints on the surface facility change as the field matures. It may be economical to revise the surface facility configurations rather than retaining the initial design of the surface facility to maintain the target production level of the field as reservoir conditions change. If reservoir pressure is not sufficient to maintain natural flow, there may be need for artificial lift mechanisms to keep the well flowing. Careful analysis of interdependence of the surface facility constraints and reservoir conditions are important in designing good quality production injection strategies for these circumstances. Coupled facility and reservoir simulations allow production optimization and determination of the impact of injection or disposal policies on reservoir management. Sometimes there are oscillations in computed production rates, which may be as a result from inaccurate treatment of a coupling algorithm, well management rules, optimization techniques, etc. Excessive fluctuations make the solution impractical to implement. In this paper, we examine the cause of well rate fluctuations in coupled simulations. We were able to keep oscillation levels at a very low level in our simulations by using a small coupling interval and by revising well management rules. We made case studies with reconfiguration of surface facility designs in two large fields to examine if those designs were capable of meeting the required production targets as the reservoir conditions change with time. Surface facility models were built using a commercially available software, which were coupled to Saudi Aramco's in-house reservoir simulator, POWERS. We examine scenarios where some facilities could be eliminated to reduce cost while maintaining required production target. We study the impact of reconfiguring the surface network and examine how surface constraints might change the overall production rate.

Application of Water Flooding and Water Alternative Gas (Wag) Flooding Techniques in a Carbonate Reservoir: Integration of Reservoir and Production Systems for Decision Making

“…Other authors (Hayder et al, 2006;Rotondi et al, 2008;Feria, 2010;Saputelli et al, 2010;Nwakile et al, 2011;Cotrim et al, 2011;Hiebert et al, 2011;Ribeiro et al, 2013;Tillero et al, 2014;Pathak et al, 2016) have presented methodologies for the construction of a complete integrated model. The primary application of integration focuses on integrated production forecasting and management, emphasizing the significance of interdependence among systems' variable.…”

A Semi-Implicit Approach for Integrated Reservoir and Surface-Network Simulation

“…The concept was extended to the black-oil system by Startzman et al (1977), and the scheme was modified by Emanuel and Ranney (1981) to operate efficiently when dealing with multiphase flow in large-scale problems. Hepguler et al (1997) and Tingas et al (1998) implemented similar schemes to couple existing commercial reservoir and network simulators. Trick (1998) extended the work of Hepguler et al by moving the coupling to the Newton iteration level.…”

Oscillation mitigation in subsurface and surface couplings using PID controllers

“…Figure 3.5: Oil rate non-physical oscillation in explicit coupling (Zhang et al, 2017). Figure 3.6: Normalized oil rate and water cut non-physical oscillation in explicit coupling (Hayder et al, 2011).…”

“….......... Figure 3.6: Normalized oil rate and water cut non-physical oscillation in explicit coupling (Hayder et al, 2011) 3.7: Sketch of explicit coupling process with simulation time domain, detailing the phase of data exchange between simulators in a discrete point (Zhang et al, 2017). .............. (Hohendorff Filho, 2012).…”