Dual Mesh Method for Upscaling in Waterflood Simulation

Detailed geological models typically contain many more cells than can be accommodated by reservoir simulation due to computer time and memory constraints. However, recovery predictions performed on a coarser upscaled mesh are inevitably less accurate than those performed on the initial fine mesh. Recent studies have shown how to use both coarse and fine mesh information during waterflooding simulations. In this paper, we present an extension of the dual mesh method (Verdière and Guérillot, 1996) which simulates water flooding injection using both the coarse and the original fine mesh information. The pressure field is first calculated on the coarse mesh. This information is used to estimate the pressure field within each coarse cell and then phase saturations are updated on the fine mesh. This method avoids the most time consuming step of reservoir simulation, namely solving for the pressure field on the fine grid. A conventional finite difference IMPES scheme is used considering a two phase fluid with gravity and vertical wells. Two upscaling methodologies are used and compared for averaging the coarse grid properties: geometric average and the pressure solve method. A series of test cases show that the method provides predictions similar to those of full fine grid simulations but using less computer time.