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UTCHEM, UTCOMP, PHREEQC, How Austin's Simulators Work

Presentation · February 2017

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.35314.30403

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Alireza Bigdeli
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 UTCHEM, UTCOMP, PHREEQC, How Austin's Simulators Work

February 2017

Supervisor : Dr.S.Riahi

Prepared By :
Alireza Bigdeli (Alirezabigdeli71@gmail.com)

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Chemical Flooding Laboratory
➢ This presentation makes an attempted to improve better understanding of Chemical Flooding
Simulators

➢ The main content of this presentation extracted from some documents that I read them during my
undergraduate and graduate studies (2014 - 2017) at IPE.

➢ Hope next generation of Iranian students of IPE will find it useful in their own business.

➢ Should you require additional information, please communicate with me by below email addresses:

• Alirezabigdeli71@gmail.com

I will be there in spirit to support all of you ☺

Ali Reza Bigdeli

Reservoir Engineer
LoSalTM and Smart Water Flooding Expert

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Chemical Flooding Laboratory
Lecture Contents

01 • Quick Review of History of Reservoir Simulators

02 • How Many Reservoir Simulators Does Austin Have?

03 • Introduction to UTCHEM and UTCOMP

• Hard Coupling and Soft Coupling of Different Reservoir Simulators
04

05 • Introduction to Geochemistry Simulation and PHREEQC Packages

06 • What are Third Generation Reservoir Simulators?

07 • Application of UML in Austin’s Simulators

08 • Data File writing for UTCHEM 9.82 Simulator

09 • Environment of UTCHEM 9.82 Simulator

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 History of Reservoir Simulators*

➢ 1950 – 1970: Study of dynamics of fluid flow and transport through porous media

➢ 1970 – 1980: Various reservoir simulators (black oil, compositional, thermal, dual porosity,
chemical) using the finite difference scheme

➢ 1980 – 1990: Commercial reservoir simulators (fully implicit and adaptive methods, fast solvers,
EOS, vector computers)

➢ 1990 – 2000: Geomodeling, geomechanics modeling, workstation computers, advanced GUIs,

parallel computers (PVM, MPI, clusters)

➢ 2000- present: Commercial unstructured grids simulators, large scale simulation on PCs (64 bites),
optimization techniques, new computer hardware (multiple cores, GPUs, OpenMP, hybrid
OpenMP-MPI, Blue Gene)

*K. Sepehrnoori’s Presentation: Reservoir Simulators: Powerful Tools for Predicting Oil and Gas Recovery, the University of Texas at Austin (UT),
August 2016

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 How Many Reservoir Simulators Does Austin Have?

UTCOMP

UTCHEM
P S
(General Purpose Adaptive Simulator)
GPAS is a :

UTWID 1. 3D,

2. Fully implicit,

UTGELL 3. multiphase/multi-component,

4. parallel reservoir simulator

UTWELL 5. It can handle simulation of several EOR
processes.

IPARS (UT Multiscale GPAS is divided into two main modules:

Simulation)
Framework
EOScomp.
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 How Many Reservoir Simulators Does Austin Have?

GPAS is divided into two main modules:

Framework
EOScomp. P S
➢ Framework is responsible for input/output domain decomposition, and memory allocation,

➢ EOScomp handles the computations for flash calculation and solution of nonlinear equations arising from
discretization of the governing equations.

➢ Details of EOScomp and Framework modules can be found in Wang et al. (1997) and Parashar et al. (1997), respectively.

Wang, P., Yotov, I., Wheeler, M., Arbogast, T., Dawson, C., Parashar, M., Sepehrnoori, K., 1997. A New Generation EOS Compositional Reservoir
Simulator: Part I — Formulation and Discretization, Paper SPE 37079. SPE Reservoir Simulation Symposium, Dallas, Texas.

Parashar, M., Wheeler, J.A., Pope, G., Wang, K., Wang, P., 1997. A New Generation EOS Compositional Reservoir Simulator: Part II — Framework
and Multiprocessing. Paper SPE 37977, SPE Reservoir Simulation Symposium, Dallas, USA.

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 Introduction to UTCHEM and UTCOMP

➢ The names that associated with the UTCHEM simulator are : Pope Delshad and Sepehrnoori

➢ The basic UTCHEM was developed in the 70s by Gary Pope at shell oil

➢ The simulator was originally developed by Pope and Nelson in 1978 to simulate the enhanced
recovery of oil using surfactant and polymer processes.*

➢ Generalizations by Bhuyanet al. in 1990 have extended the model to include other chemical
processes and a variety of geochemical reactions between the aqueous and solid phases**

*Pope, G. A. and R. C. Nelson. 1978. "A Chemical Flooding Compositional Simulator," Soc. Pet. Eng. J., 18, 339-354.
**Bhuyan, D., G. A. Pope and L. W. Lake. 1990. "Mathematical Modeling of High-pH Chemical Flooding,“ Soc. Pet. Eng. Reservoir Eng., May.

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 Introduction to UTCHEM and UTCOMP

UTCOMP is a non-isothermal, three-dimensional, equation-of-state, implicit in pressure and explicit

compositions (IMPEC), compositional reservoir simulator developed upon extensive research, at The University
of Texas at Austin

People who are involedved with UTCOMP development:

Chang, 1990; Khan, 1992; Xiao, 1994; Cheng et al., 2000; Vikas, 2002; Ghasemi Doroh, 2012; Li, 2012; Darabi,
2014; Korrani, 2014b; Mohebbinia et al., 2013; Mohebbinia, 2013; Shirdel, 2013; Rezaveisi et al., 2014a; 2014b;
Shakiba, 2014; UTCOMP Technical Documentation.

UTCOMP is capable of modeling up to four-phase (an aqueous, a gas, and two liquid hydrocarbon phases) flow
behavior. This simulator has been developed as general purpose code for miscible and immiscible gas injection
EOR processes.

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 Introduction to UTCHEM and UTCOMP

Overall flow chart of UTCOMP

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 Introduction to UTCHEM and UTCOMP

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 Hard Coupling and Soft Coupling of Different Reservoir Simulators

➢ Soft coupling and hard coupling are two coupling approaches that can be applied to different simulators
such UTCOMP and PHREEQC
➢ Compared to the hard coupling, soft coupling is easy to implement.
➢ In the soft coupling, reservoir simulator first writes the PHREEQC input file and then PHREEQC is run
externally using the created input file to find the equilibrium state of all gridblocks.
➢ When PHREEQC is done with the calculation, the reservoir simulator reads the output of PHREEQC.
Because of the writing and reading of the input and output files, soft coupling is computationally slow.

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 Introduction to UTCHEM and UTCOMP
Post Processor software of UTCHEM 9.82

➢Excel to process 2D output files

➢Surfer and Tecplot to process 3D output files directly from the UTCHEM program.

➢Kraken
1. visualize and post-process UTCHEM simulation data;
2. compare UTCHEM results with other simulators (ECLIPSE, Stars, and IMEX);
3. convert an ECLIPSE simulation data set for use with UTCHEM.

➢S3GRAF

1. provides data visualization and graphing workflows for reservoir simulation and production data.
2. S3GRAF supports UTCHEM simulation data in addition to other simulators such as Eclipse, VIP,
CMG (IMEX, GEM and STARS), 3DSL, Tempest-MORE, and others

➢GMS (Groundwater Modeling System)

can be used as a pre- and post-processing system for a sub-set of UTCHEM applications

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 Introduction to Geochemistry Simulation and PHREEQC Packages

➢ PHREEQC (pH-REdox-EQuilibrium in C programing language) is a:

➢ free, open-source, state-of-the-art geochemical package of the USGS, Fortran, Windows 32-64Bit,
Linux
• This geochemical package has the capability of equilibria calculation that includes

• Aqueous,
• Mineral,
• Gas,
• Solid-solution,
• Surface-complexation
• And ion-exchange equilibria;

• capabilities of speciation and saturation index calculation; batch-reaction and one-dimensional

transport; reversible and irreversible reactions; kinetic reaction; mixing solutions;

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 Introduction to Geochemistry Simulation and PHREEQC Packages

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 Introduction to Geochemistry Simulation and PHREEQC Packages
Coupling PHREEQC with Comsol

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 Introduction to Geochemistry Simulation and PHREEQC Packages

For more information please see “Underlying Mechanisms of low Salinity Water injection” By Bigdeli from below link:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303401211_Underlying_Mechanisms_of_Low_Salinity_LoSal_Water_Injection

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 Introduction to Geochemistry Simulation and PHREEQC Packages

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 Introduction to Geochemistry Simulation and PHREEQC Packages

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 What are Third Generation Reservoir Simulators?

Fine Grid Hex Grid Adaptive Grid

39327 Cells 1950 Cells 1932 Cells

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 What are Third Generation Reservoir Simulators?
Example With Structured
Grid: 1,600,000 gridblocks

With Flexible Grid: 119,000

cells

Unstructured Grids –
Field Application Example

Detailed near wellbore

Modeling and upscale in
condensate systems
Kim
Standford university-2009

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 What are Third Generation Reservoir Simulators?
Case1: Detailed Well Topology
Case2: Drainage Region Resolution
Case3: Gridding to Aquifers

Case 1: Multi-Lateral Well Case 2: Seamless and Efficient Case 3: Gridding to Oil/Water
Model Local Grids Contact

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 Application of UML in Austin’s Simulators

➢ The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental,

modeling language in the field of software engineering, that is intended to provide a
standard way to visualize the design of a system.

➢ Large enterprise applications - the ones that execute core business applications, and
keep a company going - must be more than just a bunch of code modules.

➢ They must be structured in a way that enables scalability, security, and robust
execution under stressful conditions, and their structure - frequently referred to as
their architecture - must be defined clearly enough that maintenance programmers
can (quickly!) find and fix a bug that shows up long after the original authors
have moved on to other projects.

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 Data File writing for UTCHEM 9.82 Simulator

➢UTCHEM requires two input files (HEAD and INPUT) for non-restart runs. For restart
runs, a binary restart file (INPUT2) is required in addition to the original input data files
used for the previous run. The HEAD input file gives UTCHEM information regarding
the name and size of the problem to be run

➢Also, to the best of Bigdeli’s experiences, UTCHEM 9.82 required five general types of
information as follow:

• RESERVOIR DESCRIPTION
• OUTPUT OPTIONS
• RESERVOIR PROPERTIES
• PHYSICAL PROPERTY DATA
• WELL DATA

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 Data File writing for UTCHEM 9.82 Simulator

Here are some examples:

• RESERVOIR DESCRIPTION:

1. RUNNO: Run number

2. TITLE
3. IMODE indicating if the problem to be run is a first run or a restart simulation.
4. IDISPC : indicating which type of numerical dispersion control is used (Single or Dual upstream models)
5. IBIO indicating whether or not biodegradation reactions occur
6. ICOORD indicating which coordinate system is used.
7. ITREAC indicating if a tracer reaction is used or not
8. IGAS indicating if gas phase is considered or not.
9. NX, NY, NZ,

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 Data File writing for UTCHEM 9.82 Simulator

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 Environment of UTCHEM 9.82 Simulator

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 Environment of UTCHEM 9.82 Simulator

Reservoir Description

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 Environment of UTCHEM 9.82 Simulator

Output Option

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 Environment of UTCHEM 9.82 Simulator

Reservoir Properties

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 Environment of UTCHEM 9.82 Simulator

PHYSICAL PROPERTY DATA

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 Environment of UTCHEM 9.82 Simulator

Well Data

Peaceman Model
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 Thank You for Watching My Presentation

Ali Reza Bigdeli

(KJ)

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