Transport in Porous Media, Vol.134, No.1, 139-172, 2020
Continuous Relative Permeability Model for Compositional Simulation
Reservoir simulation using high-fidelity fluid models is typically employed to study subsurface displacement processes that involve complex physics. Such processes are highly nonlinear and occur at the interplay of phase thermodynamics (phase stability and split) and rock/fluid interaction (relative-permeability). Due to its nonlinearity, relative-permeability is an important constitutive of the conservation equations, and has a significant impact on the simulation. Dependence of the phase relative-permeability on fluid compositions, pressure, and temperature is well-documented. In compositional reservoir simulation, however, relative-permeability is typically modeled as a function of phase saturation. Such an approach may lead to serious discontinuities in relative-permeability. To alleviate this issue, several authors proposed models based on phase state indicators (density, parachor, Gibbs Free Energy). However, such techniques cannot represent the complete degrees of freedom that are exhibited by compositional displacements. In this work, we present a relative-permeability model based on a parameterization of the compositional space. The model is independent of the hydrocarbon phase labeling as gas or oil. We show that our proposed model (1) applies regardless of the degrees-of-freedom of the compositional displacement problem, and (2) is guaranteed to yield a continuous relative-permeability function across the entire compositional space. We have implemented this model in our research simulator, and we present test cases using traditional relative-permeability models, as well as, numerical results that compare the nonlinear performance.
Keywords:Relative permeability;Compositional simulation;Gas injection;Miscible displacement;Compositional consistency