A Benchmark Calculation of 3D Horizontal Well Simulations

Abstract

The simulation of realistic multiphase flow problems in petroleum reservoirs requires means for handling the complicated structure of the reservoirs such as complex boundaries, faults, fractures, and horizontal wells. A numerical reservoir simulator has recently been developed to be able to handle these features for a wide range of applications. This fully implicit simulator is based on a three-dimensional, three-phase black oil model. It can also be used to solve a dual-porosity, dual-permeability black oil model in a fractured reservoir. The space discretization method used in this simulator is based on a block-centered finite difference method with harmonic averaged coefficients (equivalently, a mixed finite element method). In this paper we report an application of this simulator to a problem involving injection and production from horizontal wells in a reservoir where a coning tendency is important, and present a benchmark comparison with other simulators by fourteen petroleum organizations.