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Abstract

Reservoir models are commonly built to represent hydrocarbon reservoirs and study fluid flows. To properly capture reservoir heterogeneity and to account for resolution data, engineers build very detailed geological models. However, this contributes to strongly increase the number of grid blocks, hence the computational overburden. A possibility to circumvent this weakness is upscaling: it consists in converting the fine geological model into a coarser reservoir model. The resulting decrease in the number of grid blocks makes it possible to perform flow simulation in a reasonable amount of time. The coarse reservoir model does not reproduce exactly the dynamic behavior of the fine geological model as upscaling induces a loss of information. An issue is the choice of the upscaling techniques. Distinct criteria have been proposed to evaluate the information loss induced by upscaling without performing flow simulation, but none of them has focused on connectivity. We introduce a new quality indicator depending on reservoir connectivity, the leading idea being that upscaling must preserve connectivity between wells. The potential of such a criterion to evaluate the value of upscaled reservoir models is investigated by considering two types of numerical experiments inspired by the SPE10 case.

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/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.20130169
2013-06-10
2024-03-29
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http://instance.metastore.ingenta.com/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.20130169
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