Rigorous coupling of geomechanics and thermal-compositional flow for SAGD and ES-SAGD operations

Garipov, T. T.; Voskov, D.V.; Tchelepi, Hamdi A.

Rigorous coupling of geomechanics and thermal-compositional flow for SAGD and ES-SAGD operations

Conference paper (2015)

Authors

T. T. Garipov Stanford University

D.V. Voskov Stanford University

Hamdi A. Tchelepi Stanford University

Affiliation

External organisation

To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ca8c9577-d767-4c92-b06b-f3ccd08cac88

More Info

expand_more

Published Date

2015

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Affiliation

External organisation

Abstract

Steam Assistant Gravity Drainage (SAGD) is widely used to recover heavy oil and bitumen reservoirs. Typical SAGD operations involve a pair of horizontal wells separated vertically. Steam, or a steam-solvent mixture (e.g., Expanding- Solvent SAGD), is injected into the upper well to form a steam chamber and mobilize oil, which drains to the lower production well. Significant mechanical stresses associated with this process can increase the risk of fracturing the reservoir, or cap-rock. We perform a fully-coupled thermal-compositional-mechanical numerical simulation of SAGD and ES-SAGD processes for a typical bitumen reservoir in the Fort McMurray region of Alberta, Canada. A mixed finite-volume approximation for the flow and a Galerkin finite-element approximation for the mechanics are used, and the resulting set of nonlinear equations are solved using a fully implicit formulation. The two discretizations share the same unstructured grid. We demonstrate that thermo-mechanical effects can be quite significant in SAGD operations. The sharper gradients associated with the standard SAGD process increase the risk of damaging of the cap-rock. On the other hand, ES-SAGD operations lead to more dispersed temperature and pressure distributions, which decreases the possibility of damaging the cap-rock.