A Next-Generation Parallel Reservoir Simulator for Giant Reservoirs

Abstract Giant reservoirs of the Middle East are crucial for the supply of oil and gas to the world market. Proper simulation of these giant reservoirs with long history and large amount of static and dynamic data requires efficient parallel simulation technologies, powerful visualization and data processing capabilities. This paper describes GigaPOWERS, a new parallel reservoir simulator capable of simulating hundreds of millions of cells to a billion cells with long production history in practical times. The new simulator uses unstructured grids. A distributed unstructured grid infrastructure has been developed for models using unstructured or complex structured grids. Unconventional wells such as maximum reservoir contact wells and fish-bone wells, as well as faults and fractures are handled by the new gridding system. A new parallel linear solver has been developed to solve the resulting linear system of equations. Load balancing issues are also discussed. A unified compositional formulation has been implemented. The simulator is designed to handle n-porosity systems. An optimization-based well management system has been developed by using mixed integer nonlinear programming. In addition to the core computational algorithms, the paper will present the pre- and post-processing software system to handle large amount of data. Visualization techniques for billions of cells are also presented.