Mehdi Bahonar

A Semi-Unsteady-State Wellbore Steam/ Water Flow Model for Prediction of Sandface Conditions in Steam Injection Wells

A numerical nonisothermal two-phase wellbore model is developed to simulate downward flow of a steam and water mixture in the wellbore. This model entails simultaneous solution of coupled mass and momentum conservation equations inside the wellbore with an energy conservation equation for the fluids within the wellbore, surrounding medium and formation. A new drift-flux model that accounts for slip between the phases inside the wellbore is employed. In addition, a 2D implicit scheme that allows for heat transfer in both the axial and radial directions in the formation is developed. Furthermore, a rigorous nonlinear temperature- and depth-dependent overall heat transfer coefficient is implemented. The model predictions are validated against real field data and other available models. The model is useful for designing well completion and accurately computing the wellbore/formation heat transfer, which is important for estimating oil recovery by using steam injection.

Transient Nonisothermal Fully Coupled Wellbore/Reservoir Model for Gas-Well Testing, Part 1: Modelling

A numerical fully implicit nonisothermal wellbore/reservoir simulator is developed. The model entails simultaneous solution of transient coupled mass-, momentum-, and energy-balance equations within the wellbore; energy-balance equations for the tubular and cement materials and the formation surrounding the wellbore; and mass-balance and flow-rate/pressure equations for the reservoir formation. A wellbore heat-loss model that is a strong feature of this study is developed and employed in the model to improve the accuracy of the simulator and to be able to estimate the casing temperature and formation-temperature distribution. The model formulation is completed with an equation of state (EOS) to estimate fluid properties and appropriate friction-factor correlations in the wellbore tubing to compute the frictional pressure drop for different flow regimes. The developed model has several applications in the petroleum industry, particularly in the gas-well testing design and interpretation of both isothermal and nonisothermal gas reservoirs. This nonisothermal simulator is validated through comparisons to both analytical models and an equivalent numerical isothermal coupled wellbore/reservoir simulator that is also developed in this paper. Applications of this simulator to analyzing gas-well testing problems, in addition to several important observations, are extensively studied in Part 2 of this research work (Bahonar et al. 2010). Currently, it has been well accepted that the applicability and significance of a reservoir simulator depend on the behaviour of the wellbore and interaction between the wellbore and reservoir. A robust, accurate coupled wellbore and reservoir simulator is an invaluable tool for the petroleum engineer to help the petroleum industry understand production behaviour, make a meaningful prediction, and make correct decisions in all field-development and production stages.

Transient Nonisothermal Fully Coupled Wellbore/Reservoir Model for Gas-Well Testing, Part 2: Applications

After the development of a numerical fully implicit nonisothermal wellbore/reservoir simulator in Part 1 of this study (Bahonar et al. 2010), this simulator is implemented for a close and detailed study of gas-well pressure-drawdown (DD) and -buildup (BU) tests. Overall, the developed simulator is an accurate and strong tool for design and analysis of transient gas-well testing, particularly for highpressure/high-temperature (HP/HT) gas reservoirs. Several numerical results will be presented. This includes demonstration of the behaviour of the wellbore-fluid pressure, temperature, density, and velocity and an overall heat-transfer coefficient during DD or shut-in tests for nonisothermal reservoirs and conceptual comparisons with the isothermal counterparts. Thermal effects on the behaviour of derivative plots and the sandface-flow rate of deep nonisothermal gas reservoirs will be studied. A significant effect of neglecting the heat capacity of tubular and cement materials on the wellhead-temperature simulation, and thus transient well tests, will be demonstrated. A sample case to show that neglecting the thermal effects in the gas-well tests of composite reservoirs leads to unreliable results in well-testing analysis will be presented. Several other numerical experiments, including the presence of a variable wellbore-storage coefficient, gas backflow from the wellbore to the reservoir, and other thermal effects during the gas-well tests, are also presented. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year on well testing around the world (Hawkes et al. 2001). A proper design and truthful interpretation of these tests can be achieved by a reliable coupled wellbore/reservoir simulator, which in turn can save a large portion of the required costs.

Development of a Thermal Wellbore Simulator With Focus on Improving Heat Loss Calculations for SAGD Steam Injection

Industrial consortium in Reservoir Simulation and Modelling; Foundation CMG; Alberta Innovates.

Development of an Algorithm of Dynamic Gridding for Multiphase Flow Calculation in Wells

Because more and more wells have been put in operation, an accurate modelling of wellbore flow plays a significant role in reservoir simulation. One requirement of a wellbore model is its ability to trace various flow boundaries in the tubing, such as those created by phase or flow regime changing. An algorithm of dynamic gridding is applied to the wellbore flow model coupled with Stanfords general purpose research simulator (GPRS), which has the capability to simulate the isothermal black oil reservoir model to obtain detailed information that explains such important quantities as flow pattern and mixture velocity in any specific location of wellbore. A significant problem in this case is how to calculate fluid and velocity properties with a fine grid (segment) on the boundaries of different flow regimes in the wellbore. Local dynamical segment refinement in the well can accurately and effectively handle this problem. This wellbore model includes mass conservation equations for each component and a general pressure drop relationship. The multiphase wellbore flow is represented using a drift-flux model, which includes slip between three fluid phases. The model determines the pressure, mixture flow velocity, and phase holdups as functions of time and the axial position along the well or alleviation depth. In addition, this model is capable of generating automatically adaptive segment meshes. We apply the black oil model to the simulation of several cases of isothermal dynamical local mesh refinement, and compare the results with fixed coarse and fine meshes. The experiments show that using local segment refinement can yield accurate results with acceptable computational time.