Coupled geomechanics and reservoir simulation

An iterative procedure is presented in this paper to couple geomechanics and reservoir simulation models for the simulation of weaker rock formations with complex constitutive behavior. Parallel computing is employed in the coupled model to reduce run time in the compute intensive geomechanics model. The procedures developed here are general, and can be applied to any reservoir simulation and geomechanics model. Field and example problems under a variety of exploitation scenarios are presented to demonstrate the utility and robust nature of the coupled model. For example, a large-scale field case was simulated using the coupled model with 16 processors for the geomechanics model. The total CPU time for a 30-year simulation run was approximately 2 hours. These results indicate that it is both economical and practical to use the proposed procedure and parallel computing for analyzing field-scale problems that integrate reservoir and geomechanics simulation.