An Effective Streamline History Matching Technique

Abstract

Abstract The paper describes a comprehensive generic workflow that was developed to enhance the history match of the reservoir simulation model for fractured reservoirs. Commonly in the industry, such reservoirs are modeled in dual porosity, dual permeability (DPDP) mode; this is to account for the dominant effect of natural fractures. Additional complexity may be added for secondary/tertiary recovery processes and production history. Streamline trajectory mapping provides insights about fluid flow patterns and well communications, which improves our understanding of flow in the reservoir and the dynamic behaviors. Additional streamline attributes, such as allocation factors and time of flight (TOF), can help in quantifying the degree of connectivity in the reservoir. All these factors were utilized to improve history match. The workflow capitalizes on utilizing this information in methodic stages. The first step is to map the streamline and report their attributes for each timestep in the DPDP model. This first step accounts for the fluxes in both media: matrix and fracture. Once these results are obtained, the discrepancies between observed and simulated data for each well are computed, along with the graphical 3D analysis of the streamlines. These are then used to guide the modification of the target gridblock properties during history matching. It is required to perform few iterations, repeating the same procedure, to achieve acceptable history match results. The presented approach is more time effective than the conventional method, and the results demonstrate large improvements in matching the dynamic data.