Scientific engineering as the basis of modeling processes in field development

Abstract

Three characteristic examples of the use of scientific engineering approaches for managing the technological processes of reservoir modeling at different hierarchical levels are presented in the article. The first example demonstrates the application of the spectral approach for modeling geophysical fields – the available log data is decomposed from the spectrum of Legendre polynomials, after which a stochastic field of the expansion coefficients is constructed. The results obtained by this method of realizing geophysical fields correspond to real data in a wider area of modeling than in classical methods. The speed of building models also increases due to the convenience of parallelization. The second example demonstrates the use of the source method to optimize the transfer of wells into injection. A flow rate of each well is found by simulating the wells in the development system as linear sources or sinks and recording the resulting system of equations for the flows at each time. According to the optimum of discounted extraction, there is an economically efficient time for well development. The third example demonstrates the application of the theory of dimensions to the problem of hydraulic fracturing modeling to determine the significance of certain parameters for the design of fracturing. By measuring the dependence of the fracture length on the injection volume, we obtain an empirical formula for the fracture length from its parameters, which determines the level of their significance.

Keywords

• geological modeling
• geostatistics; geomechanics
• hydraulic fracturing
• hydrodynamic modeling
• source method