A Real-Field Multiscale Black-Oil Reservoir Simulator

Simulation technology is constantly evolving to take advantage of the best-available computational algorithms and computing hardware. A new technology is being jointly developed by an integrated energy company and a service company to provide a step change to reservoir-simulator performance. Multiscale methods have been rapidly developed during the past few years. Multiscale technology promises to improve simulation run time by an order of magnitude compared with current simulator performance in traditional reservoir-engineering work flows. Following that trend, the two companies have been working in collaboration on a multiscale algorithm that significantly increases performance of reservoir simulators. In this paper, we report the development of multiscale black-oil reservoir-simulation technology in a reservoir simulator used by the industry, as well as the performance and accuracy of the results obtained by use of this implementation. The multiscale method has proved to be accurate and reliable for large real-data models, and the new solver is capable of solving very-large models an order of magnitude faster than the current commercial version of the solver.