Speaker: Julien Herrero
Date: Thursday 03rd of February 2022, 1:15 pm.
Abstract:
To assess the CO2 storage capacities of an underground reservoir, it is possible to build a three-dimensional model, and then generate a mesh before being able to run the numerical simulations that will allow to quantify the CO2 quantity that can be injected. The mesh is a discretization of the geological model in a numerical grid and represents the reservoir geometry in three dimensions, ideally built only with hexahedral cells. The generation of hexahedral meshes that are aligned at the same time on the stratigraphy, the faults, and nonconformities is generally impossible. An alternative is to generate grids composed of a majority of hexahedra. The other elements can be tetrahedra, prisms, pyramids or any polyhedra. Geological modeling software and/or mesh generation software make it possible to generate these hybrid meshes. Their use in flow simulators requires adaptations of the standard industrial workflow, and especially to describe the transmissibility factors between cells. A prototyping workflow is being developed at TotalEnergies company to perform these adaptations. Before applying the workflow on the hybrid case, it is necessary to make it work on unstructured grids, i.e., meshes composed of non-hexahedral cells, because the unstructured case need fewer technical adaptations. The objective of this work is to test and adapt this workflow to allow the use of different types of meshes in different simulators. Through the workflow application on a case study, and the generation of a tetrahedral mesh, technical improvements and process validation are performed.