Absolute Permeability Upscaling for Superelement Modeling of Petroleum Reservoir

Abstract

A technique for local upscaling of absolute permeability is proposed intended for the superelement modeling of petroleum reservoir development. The upscaling is performed for every block of an unstructured superelement grid based on solving a series of stationary one-phase flow in reservoir problems on a refined grid with the initial permeability field under various boundary conditions reflecting the characteristic structural variants of the filtrational flow and taking into account the presence or absence of wells inside the block. The resulting components of the effective permeability tensor in each superelement are sought from the solution of the problem on minimizing the deviations of the normal flows through the faces of the superelement averaged on a refined computational grid from those approximated on a coarse superelement grid. The application of the method is demonstrated by examples of the reservoir of the periodic and nonperiodic structure. The method is compared with the traditional techniques for local upscaling.