TY - JOUR

T1 - Two-phase flow Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical (THM) modelling for a water flooding field case

AU - Liu, Yuhao

AU - Zhang, Fengshou

AU - Weng, Dingwei

AU - Liang, Hong

AU - He, Chunming

AU - Yoshioka, Keita

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2024 Chinese Society for Rock Mechanics & Engineering.

PY - 2024/7

Y1 - 2024/7

N2 - Simulation of subsurface energy system involves multi-physical processes such as thermal, hydraulical, and mechanical (THM) processes, and requires a so-called THM coupled modeling approach. THM coupled modeling is commonly performed in geothermal energy production. However, for hydrocarbon extraction, we need to consider multiphase flow additionally. In this paper, we describe a three-dimensional numerical model of non-isothermal two-phase flow in the deformable porous medium by integrating governing equations of two-phase mixture in the porous media flow in the reservoir. To account for inter-woven impacts in subsurface conditions, we introduced a temperature-dependent fluid viscosity and a fluid density along with a strain-dependent reservoir permeability. Subsequently, we performed numerical experiments of a ten-year water flooding process employing the open-source parallelized code, OpenGeoSys. We considered different well patterns with colder water injection in realistic scenarios. Our results demonstrate that our model can simulate complex interactions of temperature, pore pressure, subsurface stress and water saturation simultaneously to evaluate the recovery performance. High temperature can promote fluid flow while cold water injection under non-isothermal conditions causes the normal stress reduction by significant thermal stress. Under different well patterns the displacement efficiency will be changed by the relative location between injection and production wells. This finding has provided the important reference for fluid flow and induced stress evolution during hydrocarbon exploitation under the environment of large reservoir depth and high temperature.

AB - Simulation of subsurface energy system involves multi-physical processes such as thermal, hydraulical, and mechanical (THM) processes, and requires a so-called THM coupled modeling approach. THM coupled modeling is commonly performed in geothermal energy production. However, for hydrocarbon extraction, we need to consider multiphase flow additionally. In this paper, we describe a three-dimensional numerical model of non-isothermal two-phase flow in the deformable porous medium by integrating governing equations of two-phase mixture in the porous media flow in the reservoir. To account for inter-woven impacts in subsurface conditions, we introduced a temperature-dependent fluid viscosity and a fluid density along with a strain-dependent reservoir permeability. Subsequently, we performed numerical experiments of a ten-year water flooding process employing the open-source parallelized code, OpenGeoSys. We considered different well patterns with colder water injection in realistic scenarios. Our results demonstrate that our model can simulate complex interactions of temperature, pore pressure, subsurface stress and water saturation simultaneously to evaluate the recovery performance. High temperature can promote fluid flow while cold water injection under non-isothermal conditions causes the normal stress reduction by significant thermal stress. Under different well patterns the displacement efficiency will be changed by the relative location between injection and production wells. This finding has provided the important reference for fluid flow and induced stress evolution during hydrocarbon exploitation under the environment of large reservoir depth and high temperature.

KW - Field-scale model

KW - OpenGeoSys

KW - THM coupling

KW - Two phase flow

KW - Water flooding

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85194857436&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.rockmb.2024.100125

DO - 10.1016/j.rockmb.2024.100125

M3 - Article

VL - 3

JO - Rock Mechanics Bulletin

JF - Rock Mechanics Bulletin

SN - 2773-2304

IS - 3

M1 - 100125

ER -