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

Yuhao Liu, Fengshou Zhang, Dingwei Weng, Hong Liang, Chunming He, Keita Yoshioka

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Article number100125
Number of pages10
JournalRock Mechanics Bulletin
Volume3.2024
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16 Apr 2024

Bibliographical note

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

Keywords

  • Field-scale model
  • OpenGeoSys
  • THM coupling
  • Two phase flow
  • Water flooding

Cite this