Sharif Digital Repository

Effective stress variation is one of the main issues in petroleum and gheothermal reservoir development. These stress variation could cause formation damage, sand production, sloughing shale and various modes of borehole instability like induced fractures and borehole wall shearing. In petroleum engineering, drilling a borehole is the first step in reservoir development. The wellbores are implemented to produce or inject fluids such as water, oil, gas and chemical fluids used during secondary and tertiary recovery processes. Upon drilling a borehole, reservoir pore pressure, rock and fluid temperature and mechanical stresses change which induces borehole instability and variations in rock... 

Physics of the present work is 2D two-phase immiscible flow under gravitational effect through fractured porous media and the most practical formulas for transfer function in dual porosity-dual permeability models have been implemented for numerical simulation of naturally fractured reservoir. The models are: Kazemi et al. (1976), Gilman (1986), Sonier et al. (1988), Quandalle and Sabathier (1989), Lim and Aziz (1995), and Rangel-German and Kovscek (2006), which are compared using a benchmark problem and the effects of gravity, capillary, number of matrix block subdomains and dual continuum media model are studied. The benchmark problem was adopted from Gilman (1986) and involves water... 

The process of injecting acid or acidizing, is one of the most common ways to stimulate oil and gas wells. The purpose of this process is to increase the productivity of the well by increasing the permeability of the reservoir rock around the well. This is especially important in carbonate reservoirs due to damage to the formation and low intrinsic permeability in some places. In order to minimize the effects of structural damage, conventional wormhole channels are created to pass through the injured area. One of the important factors in acid validation is achieving optimal injection rate, which means obtaining the highest permeability with the lowest amount of injected acid.Numerous... 

Gas condensate reservoirs show very complex behavior as wellbore pressure falls below the reservoir fluid dew point pressure and consequently liquid phase appears near the wellbore. Since pressure drawdown is the largest near the wellbore, therefore, this region is the first that experience the liquid dropouts. With continuing the production, reservoir pressures at the other parts of the reservoir fall below the dew point pressure and as a result, condensate appears at these regions. The more the condensate accumulates near the wellbore the more decreasing the gas relative permeability occurs. Condensate accumulating does as a liquid barrier and causes not only decreasing the gas production;... 

The present article studies the isothermal and non-isothermal water injection into naturally fractured oil reservoirs by numerical simulation. The fractures in naturally fractured reservoirs can possess different characteristics. In addition. a remarkable number of naturally fractured reservoirs contain relatively heavy oils that could not be extracted economically; hence. the thermal recovery methods are extensively used for these reservoirs. Hot water injection is one of the thermal recovery methods that has not been explored enough compared to its alternatives. In this study. the effectiveness of the hot water injection over the cold (isothermal) water injection in oil production is... 

Naturally fractured reservoirs are essentially very complicated; therefore we need a systematic and reliable characterization process in order to model, analyze displacement phenomena, simulate, develop, and schedule production and other engineering processes. These kinds of reservoirs have multi-scale asymmetry while there is no specific tool to fully characterize them, and on the other hand the field data (including stratigraphy, core study, well testing and seismology) have different resolutions and accuracies, though their significant role to investigate naturally fractured reservoirs. The objective of this project is to investigate the different data sources and present their... 

Gravity drainage is the self-propulsion of oil downward in the reservoir rock. Under favorable natural and operational conditions, it has been found to effect recoveries comparable to water displacement. With modern technical knowledge, the operator can often make a choice between dissolved gas drive, water drive and gravity drainage as the principal recovery agent in a reservoir. So far, gravity drainage has received less consideration than the other two. Gravity drainage is one of the most important processes taking place in fractured reservoirs and it plays a major role in oil recovery from low permeability matrix blocks during gas injection process. Gravity drainage is responsible for... 

In imbibition process, as one of the main mechanisms of recovery from naturally fractured reservoirs, a wetting fluid enters matrix blocks and produces nonwetting phase from blocks as result of interaction between capillary, gravity and viscous forces. Depending on various characteristics of system different types of imbibition like counter-current spontaneous imbibition, cocurrent spontaneous imbibition and dynamic counter-current imbibition could occur. In order to predict recovery from matrix blocks scaling equations can be used. In this thesis suitable scaling equations are presented for different types of imbibition by using analytical solutions. The studies cases are counter-current... 

Most of oil content, especially in Iran, has been reserved in fractured reservoirs, so study and modeling of production mechanism of these reservoirs are great of importance. Gravity drainage is one of these effective production mechanisms in fractured porous media which dynamic pore scale modeling of this mechanism will lead to better understanding of it. In this work, the effects of variety of parameters such as oil gravity, interfacial tension between oil and gas, pore and throat size distribution, fracture aperture, and block to block interaction (capillary continuity and reinfiltartion) have been investigated. So developed simulator in this work has two main and separated parts, which... 

Hydrocarbon recovery projects involve large capital investments and have a very high risk associated with them. To minimize this risk, accurate predictions of reservoir performance must be acquired. Reservoir simulation is a powerful tool for fulfilling this requirement. Physics, mathematics, reservoir engineering and computer programming are combined in reservoir simulation in order to predict reservoir performance under different situations both accurately and efficiently. Performance prediction in fractured reservoirs is a much harder task. This difficulty is due to the higher uncertainties associated with their physical and geometrical parameters. More than 60% of world, and almost 70%... 

Fractured reservoirs show a different behavior from common reservoirs because of the existence of a broad network of fractures. This phenomenon makes it necessary to apply special methods for fractured reservoirs in the procedure of reservoir simulation. Since twenty percent of petroleum content in the world is buried in fractured reservoirs, investigating these reservoirs is of great importance.
The first step in simulation of these kinds of reservoirs is to come up with a geometrical model which can be used to take the fracture network influence into account. In the course for reaching such an objective, various models have been developed which are based on specific assumptions and in... 

Enhancing oil production from fractured reservoirs is challenging. The flow characteristics observed in naturally fractured reservoirs are complicated due to interaction between the two different flow domains: fracture and matrix. Spontaneous imbibition is one of the most important recovery processes in water-wet fractured reservoirs. Oil cannot be spontaneously produced from oil-wet rocks, unless the capillary pressure barrier between fracture conduits and matrix is overcome. The flow characteristics in fractured systems thus relate to the wettability of the rocks. Low salinity water injection has been widely studied as a method of enhancing oil recovery in recent years. However, its impact... 

In this work, simulation of 3D three-phase naturally fractured reservoirs is studied. Both Dual Porosity and Dual Porosity-Dual Permeability models which are commonly used in commercial softwares such as ECLIPSE and CMG, are utilized. The governing equations include the mass (in Black-oil model) and linear momentum (in Darcy law form) equations, which are converted into pressure equations and a set of transport equations for the saturations and mole fractions of phases. These equations are solved once for the matrix domain and subsequently for the fracture domain. These two set of equations are coupled through transfer functions. The accuracy of computations significantly depends on how... 

In This work, the performance of a finite volume (FV) numerical method is examined for simulating naturally fractured hydrocarbon reservoir. The dual-porosity approach applied for fracture modeling, and the flow transfer formulated based on a generalized black oil model which is based on matrix formulation, leading to a system of equations prone to degeneracy. This FV high-resolution central scheme numerical method is not sensitive to the choice of CFL number like some of other central schemes and can conveniently handle degenerate equations appearing in the reservoir simulation governing equation. In this effort, one dimension multi phase flow simulated in naturally fractured reservoir and... 

Free fall gravity drainage is one of the most effective mechanisms of producing the oil from the matrix blocks in the gas invaded zone of the naturally fractured reservoirs. Although several analytical models have been proposed to characterize this mechanism in a matrix block, but these models suffer from the practical or theoretical viewpoints. In this study, a new analytical model was presented to predict the oil production rate versus time from a homogeneous matrix block under free fall gravity drainage mechanism. The model was developed by considering the balance between involved forces in the gas-oil gravity drainage process. By simplifying the equation derived from the momentum... 

The discrete fracture network and continuous fracture network are among the most widely used methods to model naturally fractured reservoirs. Each method faces particular limitations. The recently introduced recovery curve method (RCM) is believed to meet the limitations of the common methods. In the RCM the recovery curves are used to more realistically describe matrix-fracture interactions. It is necessary to present appropriate solutions to apply the RCM in the real fileds and also to evaluate it based on the historical production data. In this work at first, the basics of the RCM are presented then with a simple column model this method is validated. Then in a column model and a field... 

Oil reservoir simulation serves an important role in forecasting oil production. This forecast, in turn, helps to devise a production scheme for hydrocarbon reservoirs which is one of main objectives of reservoir management team. In this research, using the idea of logarithmic distribution of reservoir fluid pressure around a wellbore, a new method for simulation of naturally fractured reservoir is developed. This method is shown to be more fast and accurate than conventional methods in reservoir simulation. In this method Dual-Porosity formulation is used for description of fluid flow in fractured reservoirs. The governing equations then were discretized by Galerkin Finite element method in... 

The main goal of petroleum reservoir simulation is finding of Pressure (P) and Saturation (S) of fluid in different places of prose media environment of the reservoir in a specific time interval. In this project we will implement a distributed reservoir simulator of a cluster. In fact parallelization of reservoir simulator is finding a method to decompose the reservoir domain into some region and assigning each region to a computer in a cluster of parallel computers in order to minimize the total amount of dependency of regions to each other and messages between nodes in the parallel network according to fluid equation in the system and finaly minimize' the duration of simulation. In this... 

In fractured reservoirs under the gravity mechanism, the oil transfer between the matrix blocks is affected by mechanisms such as capillary continuity or re-imbibition. Capillary continuity between adjacent matrix blocks can be created by formation of liquid bridges, or physical contact of surfaces due to the roughness of the fracture wall surface.Since the presence of liquid bridges can be effective in creating capillary continuity and therefore the amount of oil production, the study of the presence of liquid bridges between matrix blocks and how they change in terms of volume and shape in the process of oil and gas movement is of particular importance. Although there are studies on the... 

Hydraulic fracturing process as one of the most important ways to inhanse of production requires careful study and investigation and due to its importance has been studied for decades. The effect of this process on the production at oil and gas industry has many complexities and these complexities with the complex structure of natural gaps, would be multiplied. In this thesis effect of hydraulic fracturing operation on the production of natural fractures at naturaly fractured reservoirs from two aspects of hydraulic and geomechanics will be investigated. First we provide models for fractures network by using UDEC software after that investigate the effect of hydraulic farcture on the natural...