Development of a Parallel Simulator Utilizing Multiple Interacting Continua and Embedded Discrete Fracture Models in Fractured Unconventional Reservoirs

Abstract Unconventional petroleum reservoirs, such as shale gas and tight oil reservoirs, have changed the entire energy equation in the world. An accurate and efficient reservoir simulator is essential for the development and management of these reservoirs and the optimization of their production schedules. However, the gas storage and transport mechanisms in ultra-tight matrix, including gas adsorption/desorption, non-Darcy flow, and surface diffusion, are different from those in conventional petroleum reservoirs. In addition, hydraulic fracturing techniques are often required to achieve their economical production, which leads to existence of complex fracture networks in the unconventional reservoirs. These features of unconventional reservoirs make their accurate numerical simulations a big challenge. In this paper, we develop a simulator for fractured unconventional reservoirs, which takes the specific gas storage and transport mechanisms into consideration, employs a multiple interacting continua (MINC) model to handle well connected natural fractures, utilizes an embedded discrete fracture model to simulate large-scale disconnected hydraulic fractures, and uses a coupled model to efficiently describe multi-scale fractures with irregular geometries. To reduce the computational time, parallel computing techniques are also employed, with which large-scale reservoir simulation cases can be finished in practical time. From the numerical experiments, we can see that reasonable physical phenomena is captured and accurate predictions are performed by this simulator.