Improved upscaling and reservoir simulation of enhanced oil recovery processes in naturally fractured reservoirs

Abstract

Naturally fractured reservoirs (NFR) contain a significant amount of remaining petroleum reserves and are now considered for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) schemes that involve three-phase flow such as water-alternating-gas (WAG) injection. Accurate numerical simulation of flow in NFR is essential for sound reservoir management decisions to maximise oil recovery and minimise the cost of field development. In this thesis, two important issues related to flow simulation in NFR are investigated. First, a step-wise upscaling approach is developed to evaluate the accuracy of dual porosity models in estimating matrix-fracture transfer duringWAG injection. It was found that the classical dual porosity models generally overestimate recovery from matrix blocks. Hence, a double block model was developed and extended to a multi-rate dual porosity (MRDP). The multi-rate double block model showed significant improvements in matching detailed fine grid simulations of three-phase matrix-fracture transfer. Second, the accuracy of upscaling discrete fracture networks (DFN) is assessed and its impact on history matching was investigated on a real fractured reservoir. A new method to upscale the shape factors needed for MRDP models from DFN is presented. This method is a notable step towards more accurate but still efficient reservoir simulation in NFR.