Multiscale analysis and large-scale parallelization of heterogeneous reservoir models

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A large portion of the oil in Alberta is produced from heavy and superheavy oil reservoirs. The extraction process in such cases is based on new technologies that are required to be (i) energy efficient; (ii) environmentally safe. The achievement of these goals is greatly facilitated by numerical simulations that provide the engineers with accurate estimates for various parameters of the wells and allow for an efficient optimization of the production process. Such simulations also greatly reduce the environmental risks since they allow to minimize the needs of expensive and hazardous field experiments. Laricina Energy Ltd., being one of the major players in the development of the Athabasca oil field, has developed its own open access reservoir simulator which is specialized in the simulation of non-isothermal heavy oil reservoirs. It comprises state-of-the-art mathematical models and numerical solution techniques. The present project is aimed at the further development of these solution techniques and the code which will include: (i) development of proper preconditioners that take into account the specifics of the models used and allow for efficient simulations on very large scale parallel distributed computer clusters; (ii) development of reduced mathematical models that allow for very fast and yet relatively accurate simulations of very large heavy oil reservoirs. The benefits of these developments are that on one hand the developed preconditioning techniques and software will greatly increase the efficiency of the numerical solvers which will allow for more accurate computations. On the other hand, the reduced order models will allow for very fast simulations that can be used to run many different scenarios for a given production site with much reduced computational costs, before running a full-scale and very precise computations of just several of them. These techniques will enable Laricina Energy Ltd. to continue to be at the cutting edge of the technological development for production from heavy and superheavy oil reservoirs. The developed open access software will be also accessible to other users and therefore will benefit the entire development of the heavy oil fields in Northern Alberta.