Streamline simulation of hot water flooding processes in heavy oil reservoirs

Conventional simulations of hot water flooding processes are based on fully-implicit finite difference (FD) thermal models, which have been successfully applied to thermal simulation. However, these models require long computational times and may suffer from grid orientation effects. Streamline simulation offers a viable alternative to FD simulation if the reservoir heterogeneity and fluid mobility dominate the displacement mechanism. This paper describes the development and verification of a new streamline-based model, and applications to the simulation of hot water flooding processes in heavy oil reservoirs. For simplification of the modeling, heat was assumed to transfer only by convection, in the direction parallel with the flowing phases. This convective heat flow was solved implicitly along streamlines. An important extension of this method did not assume volumetric heat flux along streamlines as a constant but as a variable depending on the temperature and pressure. This variable was introduced as a sink or source in the streamline heat transport model. The developed model was applied to three case studies and the results were compared with those from the 5- and 9-point schemes of a commercial fully-implicit thermal simulator. The streamline results were closer to those of the 9-point scheme than the 5-point scheme. The results also demonstrated that the streamline-based model minimizes the grid orientation effects and requires less time than the FD thermal model.