Productivity and Injectivity of Horizontal Wells

The generation of suitable simulation grids for heterogeneous media and specific discretization issues that arise. Streamlines and equipotentials are used to define our base grids. Since streamlines are concentrated in high velocity regions they provide a natural means of clustering fine grid cells in crucial flow regions. For complex configurations and particularly for strongly heterogeneous regions the resulting grid cells can become very distorted due to extremely high curvatures. Two types of cell centered formulation are examined together with a cell vertex-point distributed scheme. Important distinctions are found for highly distorted cells. The new grids are tested for accuracy in terms of critical breakthrough parameters and it is shown that a much higher level of grid resolution is required by conventional simulators in order to achieve results that are comparable with those computed on relatively coarse streamline-potential grids