Advective Heat Transport and the Salt Chimney Effect: A Numerical Analysis

We conducted numerical simulations of coupled fluid and heat transport in an offshore, buried salt diapir environment to determine the effects of advective heat transport and its relation to the so-called “salt chimney effect.” Model sets were designed to investigate (1) salt geometry, (2) depth-dependent permeability, (3) geologic heterogeneity, and (4) the relative influence of each of these factors. Results show that decreasing the dip of the diapir induces advective heat transfer up the side of the diapir, elevating temperatures in the basin. Depth-dependent permeability causes upwelling of warm waters in the basin, which we show to be more sensitive to basal heat flux than brine concentration. In these model scenarios, heat is advected up the side of the diapir in a narrower zone of upward-flowing warm water, while cool waters away from the diapir flank circulate deeper into the basin. The resulting fluid circulation pattern causes increased discharge at the diapir margin and fluid flow downward, above the crest of the diapir. Geologic heterogeneity decreases the overall effects of advective heat transfer. The presence of low permeability sealing horizons reduces the vertical extent of convection cells, and fluid flow is dominantly up the diapir flank. The combined effects of depth-dependent permeability coupled with geologic heterogeneity simulate several geologic phenomena that are reported in the literature. In this model scenario, conductive heat transfer dominates in the basal units, whereas advection of heat begins to affect the middle layers of the model and dominates the upper units. Convection cells split by sealing layers develop within the upper units. From our highly simplified models, we can predict that advective heat transport (i.e., thermal convection) likely dominates in the early phases of diapirism when sediments have not undergone significant compaction and retain high porosity and permeability. As the salt structures mature into more complex geometries, advection will diminish due to the increase in dip of the salt-sediment interface and the increased hydraulic heterogeneity due to complex stratigraphic architecture.

Reservoir Modeling for Flow Simulation by Use of Surfaces, Adaptive Unstructured Meshes, and an Overlapping-Control-Volume Finite-Element Method

Summary We present new approaches to reservoir modeling and flow simulation that dispose of the pillar-grid concept that has persisted since reservoir simulation began. This results in significant improvements to the representation of multiscale geologic heterogeneity and the prediction of flow through that heterogeneity. The research builds on more than 20 years of development of innovative numerical methods in geophysical fluid mechanics, refined and modified to deal with the unique challenges associated with reservoir simulation. Geologic heterogeneities, whether structural, stratigraphic, sedimentologic, or diagenetic in origin, are represented as discrete volumes bounded by surfaces, without reference to a predefined grid. Petrophysical properties are uniform within the geologically defined rock volumes, rather than within grid cells. The resulting model is discretized for flow simulation by use of an unstructured, tetrahedral mesh that honors the architecture of the surfaces. This approach allows heterogeneity over multiple length-scales to be explicitly captured by use of fewer cells than conventional corner-point or unstructured grids. Multiphase flow is simulated by use of a novel mixed finite-element formulation centered on a new family of tetrahedral element types, PN(DG)–PN+1, which has a discontinuous Nth-order polynomial representation for velocity and a continuous (order N +1) representation for pressure. This method exactly represents Darcy-force balances on unstructured meshes and thus accurately calculates pressure, velocity, and saturation fields throughout the domain. Computational costs are reduced through dynamic adaptive-mesh optimization and efficient parallelization. Within each rock volume, the mesh coarsens and refines to capture key flow processes during a simulation, and also preserves the surface-based representation of geologic heterogeneity. Computational effort is thus focused on regions of the model where it is most required. After validating the approach against a set of benchmark problems, we demonstrate its capabilities by use of a number of test models that capture aspects of geologic heterogeneity that are difficult or impossible to simulate conventionally, without introducing unacceptably large numbers of cells or highly nonorthogonal grids with associated numerical errors. Our approach preserves key flow features associated with realistic geologic features that are typically lost. The approach may also be used to capture near-wellbore flow features such as coning, changes in surface geometry across multiple stochastic realizations, and, in future applications, geomechanical models with fracture propagation, opening, and closing.