An Improved Methodology For Gridding Fractured Reservoirs For Simulation

A significant amount of research for gridding of complex reservoirs, including models with fractures, has focused on the use of unstructured grids. While models with unstructured grids can be extremely flexible, they can also be expensive, both in configuring, computationally, and visual display. Even with this focus on unstructured grids, most reservoir simulation models are still built on structured grids. Current methods for creating reservoir simulation models with structured grids often involve defining a base grid upfront and then “somehow” inserting one or more Features of Interest (FOI’s) into the model. Applied to fractured horizontal wells with many stages it can be extremely difficult to accurately align wells and completions within a pre-existing simulation grid. <br>This work describes and demonstrates a methodology to resolve such issues. This approach changes the order of model design and creation steps. This paper describes the process where FOI’s are iden