Modeling complex wells with the multi-scale finite-volume method

  • Authors:

  • Patrick Jenny;Ivan Lunati

  • Affiliations:

  • Institute of Fluid Dynamics, ETH Zurich, ETH-Center, Sonneggstrasse 3, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland;Laboratory of Environmental Fluid Mechanics, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, ícole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computational Physics
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

In this paper, an extension of the multi-scale finite-volume (MSFV) method is devised, which allows to simulate flow and transport in reservoirs with complex well configurations. The new framework fits nicely into the data structure of the original MSFV method and has the important property that large patches covering the whole well are not required. For each well, an additional degree of freedom is introduced. While the treatment of pressure-constraint wells is trivial (the well-bore reference pressure is explicitly specified), additional equations have to be solved to obtain the unknown well-bore pressure of rate-constraint wells. Numerical simulations of test cases with multiple complex wells demonstrate the ability of the new algorithm to capture the interference between the various wells and the reservoir accurately.