"Fully Coupled Geomechanics and Flow Simulation for Time-Lapse Seismic"

Jorg Herwanger (MP Geomechanics)

Time-lapse seismic is now an established technology for areal reservoir monitoring. The future promises an even tighter integration between seismic reservoir monitoring and simulation models describing the flow and geomechanical processes during reservoir production. 

To this end, the SEG under its SEAM consortium, conducted a pilot study to test the ability to accurately simulate reservoir production and reservoir geomechanics, use these simulations to predict velocity changes, simulate full waveform synthetics and create migrated images of these data. 

In this technical breakfast, we share the reservoir flow and geomechanical simulations, as well as the rock-physics modeling. 

The simulator is based on finite-element technology. This allows to employ an innovative meshing algorithm that retains the geometry of individual turbidite fans. The simulations clearly demonstrate different reservoir production processes, such as gas-out-of-solution, different speeds of pressure and fluid fronts, as well as reservoir compaction (due to pressure decrease) and dilation (around injectors).