SPE Journal
Volume 11, Number 4, December 2006, pp. 443-453

Summary

Upscaling is often applied to coarsen detailed geological reservoir descriptions to sizes that can be accommodated by flow simulators. Adaptive local-global upscaling is a new and accurate methodology that incorporates global coarse-scale flow information into the boundary conditions used to compute upscaled quantities (e.g., coarse-scale transmissibilities). The procedure is iterated until a self-consistent solution is obtained. In this work, we extend this approach to 3D systems and introduce and evaluate procedures to decrease the computational demands of the method. This includes the use of purely local upscaling calculations for the initial estimation of coarse-scale transmissibilities and the use of reduced border regions during the iterations. This is shown to decrease the computational requirements of the reduced procedure significantly relative to the full methodology, while impacting the accuracy very little. The performance of the adaptive local-global upscaling technique is evaluated for three different heterogeneous reservoir descriptions. The method is shown to provide a high degree of accuracy for relevant flow quantities. In addition, it is shown to be less computationally demanding and significantly more accurate than some existing extended local upscaling procedures.

Introduction

Fine-scale heterogeneity can have a significant impact on reservoir performance. Because it is usually not feasible to simulate directly on the detailed geocellular model, some type of upscaling is often applied to generate the simulation model from the geological description. Here, we focus on the upscaling of single-phase flow parameters, particularly absolute permeability. The algorithms we consider can provide either coarse-scale permeability, designated k^*, or coarse-scale transmissibility, designated T^* . It is important to emphasize that the accurate upscaling of permeability (which can be studied within the context of single-phase flow) is essential for the development of accurate coarse models of two-phase or multiphase flow. Thus the applicability of the methods developed here is very broad and includes all types of displacement processes.

© 2006. Society of Petroleum Engineers

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History

• Original manuscript received: 6 December 2004
• Revised manuscript received: 4 August 2006
• Manuscript approved: 8 August 2006
• Version of record: 20 December 2006