Parallel Reservoir Simulation of Oil Flow Using PETSc and Implicit Schemes

Resumo

We employ the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc), a numerical library designed for high-performance parallel computing, to solve the algebraic systems arising from the discretization of the governing equations for slightly compressible two-dimensional oil flow in porous media. This computational step, being the most resource-intensive, is optimized through parallelization to reduce execution time while preserving solution accuracy. Our methodology integrates an implicit time-stepping scheme and Picard linearization to model reservoir pressure evolution and well production, including well-reservoir coupling. We perform a mesh refinement study and sensitivity analyses by varying key reservoir parameters and fluid properties. PETSc’s parallel solvers yield substantial performance gains, validating the efficiency of our approach. This work highlights the applicability of PETSc in reservoir simulation and emphasizes the role of parallel computing in accelerating large-scale subsurface flow simulations.