Streamline-Based EOR Simulations

Abstract 

    Secondary oil recovery led by water floodaccounts for one half of the oil recovered in the United States. Furthermore,streamline simulation is becoming more and more popular these days due to itshigher speed compared with finite-difference method. In this paper, astreamline simulator is developed for water flood and gas injection. Oilrecovery and water cut from the streamline simulator are compared with theircounterparts from a finite-difference simulator. In addition, a practicalmethod to implement an extremely large time step in streamline simulation isintroduced. Results show that numerical dispersions decrease from finitedifference method, to numerical streamline method, and to analytical streamlinemethod. For numerical method, numerical dispersions decrease with increasedtime step size. By using the new practical method, the streamline simulationcan be greatly sped up.