Title: Development of a parallel chemical flooding reservoir simulator

Authors: Masoud Behzadinasab; Ederson A. Grein; Kamy Sepehrnoori

Addresses: Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA ' Engineering Simulation & Scientific Software, 100 Orlando Phillipi, Florianópolis, SC, 88032-700, Brazil ' Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA

Abstract: Simulation of large-scale and complicated reservoirs requires a large number of gridblocks, which consumes a considerable amount of memory and is computationally expensive. One solution to remedy the computational problem is to take advantage of clusters of CPUs and high-performance computing widely available nowadays. We can run large-scale simulations faster and more efficiently by using parallel processing on these clusters. In this study, we developed a parallel version of an in-house comprehensive chemical flooding reservoir simulator called UTCHEM using MPI functions. Several case studies were used to validate the simulator. The speedup results also show very good parallel efficiency. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that such a comprehensive chemical reservoir simulator is parallelised, which can be effective in running large-scale cases involving various type of chemical EOR processes, with millions of gridblocks, in few hours. [Received: November 25, 2015; Accepted: June 18, 2016]

Keywords: parallel processing; high-performance computing; HPC; chemical flooding modelling; reservoir simulation; UTCHEM.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOGCT.2017.086353

International Journal of Oil, Gas and Coal Technology, 2017 Vol.16 No.2, pp.111 - 129

Received: 14 Dec 2015
Accepted: 18 Jun 2016

Published online: 04 Sep 2017 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article