DEVELOPMENT OF A NOVEL FRAMEWORK FOR SEQUENTIAL COUPLING OF RESERVOIR, WELLS, AND SURFACE FACILITIES

Resumo

Petroleum production systems consist of three individual elements that are operating together:
reservoir, wells, and surface facilities. Design, construction, and maintenance of surface facilities for
hydrocarbon production require realistic simulation studies. These studies become much more realistic
when well and surface facilities are simulated together with the reservoir. In this work, a literature survey
was performed and different coupling approaches were discussed. Then, the new framework was
introduced as a tool for coupling the reservoir, well and surface facility using the in-house UTCOMP
simulator. UTCOMP is a compositional simulator, which has been developed at The University of Texas
at Austin. This formulation is designed to use flow tables in order to compute wells and surface facility
interactions. The presented framework enabled UTCOMP to read surface facilities data, which were
generated by a commercial simulator. Some new software was developed to read and compare the flow
table’s data and enable surface facility option within UTCOMP. In this study, the new features added to
UTCOMP were: (a) inserting a new flow table option, (b) including surface pipelines length and
diameter, (c) calculation of operational condition like gas-oil ratio and water-oil ratio at the surface
condition and (d) an output file for surface facilities information. Also, we show results of two case
studies. Using the developed tool, we are able to understand the behavior of petroleum production
systems and identify the main factors that affect production operations.