Improved Reservoir Characterization of Flow Connectivity in Complex Carbonate Field, Using DepoGrid Model

Abstract The Mishrif formation in Abu Dhabi comprises progradational shelf margin facies. The western platform sediments are characterized by stacked clinoforms of clean high energy carbonates, with generally good reservoir properties at the top deteriorating gradually toward the west flank. In contrast in the east the formation is thicker and characterized by more differentiated, coarsening, shoaling- upwards sequences. High quality reservoir facies occur only near the prograding shelf edges. The reservoir in this study had finely layered pillar grid models of the field using onlap and offlap layering to capture the vertical property heterogeneity and layering within the clinoforms implied by the depositional environment. However, this grid structure posed challenges for flow simulation as there were unphysical barriers and connections across the clinoform boundaries caused by the pinching out layers at boundaries between clinoform units. By construction, in a depogrid each clinoform may be independently gridded with coordinate lines that do not need to be continuous through the vertical extent of the reservoir. Layers within a sequence can truncate arbitrarily against bounding discontinuities since the cells are polyhedral and the grid globally unstructured. Therefore, an evaluation of the depogrid cut-cell grid was undertaken for the reservoir. A volume-based model was constructed using horizon surfaces and fault surfaces extracted from the pillar grid model, and the depospace transform calculated. The depogrid was created using the same areal resolution as the pillar grid. The layer parameters were set to give approximately the same number of layers in each zone as the pillar grid. The rock type base properties from the pillar grid were upscaled onto the depogrid, in the interest of time, to populate the static depogrid model. Reservoir fluid properties, relative permeability, and capillary pressure curves were taken from existing simulation models of the field. A high-resolution reservoir simulator was then run on the depogrid model. Run time comparisons of the pillar and depogrid simulations were made The evaluation concluded that the cut-cell stratigraphically layered depogrid provided a more geologically consistent representation of the complex stacked clinoform structural elements and required significantly fewer grid layers to achieve the required vertical resolution. The depogrid simulations could represent the expected connectivity for flow. Improved run times were observed