Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Numerical Simulation of Giant Middle East Oil & Gas Reservoirs

Ali Dogru, Saudi Aramco

Abstract

Middle East contains giant oil and gas reservoirs. Managing production and recovery from these reservoirs is vital for the world economy. Numerical reservoir simulation play critical role in developing and managing these reservoirs. Reservoir simulators consist of set of non-linear coupled partial differential equations describing compressible multiphase, multi-component fluid flow in porous media. Since fluids are produced through wells, reservoir simulators also include flow in pipes and pipe networks. This talk will cover space and time discretization, linearization, sparse linear solvers and parallelization used in an industrial simulator. Scalability will be illustrated on thousands of cores. Real field simulation examples for the world’s largest oil fields using billions of elements will be demonstrated. Benefits of using high fidelity models versus coarse grid models will be illustrated. Future directions in reservoir simulation, computations, will be discussed. Current and future challenges in large scale simulation will be addressed. In general this talk will demonstrate how the industry uses sophisticated mathematical modeling to sustain production and improve recovery from the giant oil and gas fields.