Title
Salt Precipitation and Water Evaporation Modelling in a Black-Oil Reservoir Simulator
Author
Goncalves Machado, C.
Egberts, P.J.P.
Alvestad, J.
Hustad, O.S.
Publication year
2023
Abstract
Salt precipitation is a major issue in gas fields as it may reduce production significantly. Salt precipitation can be triggered through evaporation of the brine into the gas leading to an increased brine salt concentration and - if reaching its solubility - precipitation will occur reducing the rock porosity and, consequently, the permeability. In this work, the open-source fully implicit black-oil reservoir simulator OPM-flow is extended to allow for salt precipitation and water evaporation modeling. In comparison to compositional approaches, the proposed formulation simplifies the model set-up and calculation procedure. An existing black oil simulation may easily be converted to include water vaporization and salt precipitation functionality. This facilitates the modeling of fields that suffer from salt precipitation and their incorporation in history matching and optimization workflows. The black-oil formulation was modified to allow the gas to contain vaporized water in addition to vaporized oil. The salt transport equation is modified to account for a solid salt precipitate, and the permeability reduction is dealt with through a mobility multiplier that depends on the change in porosity. Together, a novel fully implicit formulation was developed for salt precipitation/dissolution and water evaporation for a three-phase black-oil simulator and implemented in OPM-flow. This implementation enables simulation of salt precipitation for gas-condensate production wells in addition to gas production wells.
Subject
salt precipitation
water evaporation
OPM-flow
black-oil formulation
fully implicit coupling
To reference this document use:
http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:bead15e6-80f4-4baa-94c4-a8355bb8cdb7
TNO identifier
986068
Publisher
Society of Petroleum Engineers
Source
The SPE Reservoir Simulation Conference held in Galveston, Texas, USA, 28–30 March 2023, 1-10
Document type
conference paper