Numerical Simulations of Polymer Flooding Process in Porous Media on Distributed-memory Parallel Computers

TL;DR

This paper develops a parallel computer simulation model for polymer flooding in porous media, demonstrating high scalability and matching industry-standard results, thus advancing computational methods in enhanced oil recovery.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable parallel simulation framework for polymer flooding, incorporating detailed physical modeling and numerical methods, validated against commercial software.

Findings

Simulation results align with Schlumberger-Eclipse outputs.

The model scales efficiently up to 27 million grid blocks.

Parallel implementation achieves high computational performance.

Abstract

Polymer flooding is a mature enhanced oil recovery technique that has been successfully applied in many field projects. By injecting polymer into a reservoir, the viscosity of water is increased, and the efficiency of water flooding is improved. As a result, more oil can be recovered. This paper presents numerical simulations of a polymer flooding process using parallel computers, where the numerical modeling of polymer retention, inaccessible pore volumes, a permeability reduction and polymer absorption are considered. Darcy's law is employed to model the behavoir of a fluid in porous media, and the upstream finite difference (volume) method is applied to discretize the mass conservation equations. Numerical methods, including discretization schemes, linear solver methods, nonlinearization methods and parallel techniques are introduced. Numerical experiments show that, on one hand, computed results match those from the commercial simulator, Schlumberger-Eclipse, which is widely applied by the petroleum industry, and, on the other hand, our simulator has excellent scalability, which is demonstrated by field applications with up to 27 million grid blocks using up to 2048 CPU cores.