December

Special Seminar

Prof. Dominque Guerillot

Topic: Dual Mesh Methods for Compositional Reservoir Simulation with Rock-Fluid Interaction with a synthetic case study with CO2 injection

The geological static models of realistic contexts are described with High Resolution Meshes (HRM) and cannot be directly used as input for fluid flow reservoir simulators due to memory and/or running time constraints. The pragmatic approach consists in averaging the high resolution petrophysical values to assign to a Low Resolution Mesh (LRM) used to perform reservoir simulations. Hence, predictions made with these coarser meshes are inevitably less accurate than those that would have been obtained on HRM. Moreover, observing that a priori upscaling of relative permeability curves is often not feasible, Guérillot & Verdière (1995;1996) proposed to consider 2 meshes: one for the pressure & one for the saturations. The parameters for the pressure equation are upscaled during the flow processes. This generates relative permeability curves which are dependent not only on the average saturation but depend also on the distribution of the saturations in the high resolution grid. This successful idea has been developed by several authors: Guedes & Schiozer (2001), Audigane & Blunt (2003).
For compositional modelling, the loss of accuracy due to upscaling processes will come not only for the component displacements but also from the solution of the thermodynamic and/or geochemical equilibrium equations. For example, a chemical reaction of an acid on carbonated rock may highly depends on its concentration. Therefore, our main motivation here is to keep an HRM for calculating those chemical equilibria. Examples to illustrate the method will be presented.

Biography:

Dr. Dominique Guérillot is Professor at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) since February 1, 2016 in the Petroleum Engineering Department. His is in charge of the R&D in this department.
Former member of the Executive Committee and Managing Director of the Exploration & Reservoir Engineering Business Unit of IFP (’82-’06), Program Director for the Upstream R&D of Saudi Aramco (‘06-’09), Senior Consultant for Petrobras (’10-’13), Head of Reservoir Research with Qatar Petroleum (’13-’15), he is focusing in R&D delivering efficient methodologies and software in Basin and Reservoir Characterization and Simulation for the Oil and Gas Exploration and Production including Carbonate Reservoirs, Unconventionals and CO2 storage. 
After a PhD in Applied Mathematics, he joined IFP in 1982 at 25 years old. He enjoyed to be associated to the launching of the ELF Geoscience Research Centre in London U.K. (91-93). Then, he started an IFP branch in Pau for a strategic alliance with Elf (Helios project). After being the Director of the Geology and Geochemistry (95-01).
In 2009, he created a Young Innovative Company (YIC), Terra 3E, in the area of Energy and Environment and n 2012, he was called by the European Commission for R&D projects on CO2 Storage.
He published more than 50 full and refereed papers, holds 5 patents, trained with University professors 5 PhD students and 2 postdocs, is member of the IJOGCT editorial team, the SPE and EAGE, referee of the Oil & Gas Science and Technology (OGST).

More details could be found
at: https://pete.qatar.tamu.edu/OurPeople/Pages/DR_Dominique.aspx