Bio

Leytzher has over 12 years of experience as a reservoir engineer working on a wide range of projects in South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. His work as a reservoir engineer is oriented toward numerical reservoir simulation and field development planning. He recently became interested in A New Kind of Science and hopes to be able to apply NKS methods to solve petroleum engineering problems.

Project: 3d Pore Scale Modeling of Waterflooding in an Oil Reservoir

This project consists in the tridimensional modeling of a waterflooding process in an oil bearing reservoir. The objective is to visualize the bypassed oil at water breakthrough.

The scope of work includes:

• Generation of a 3D pore network model
• Definition of streaming and collision rules for the fluids involved in the model
• Visualization of cross-sections through the 3D grid model after waterflooding to visually estimate bypassed oil

Some suggestions on how this can be achieved:

1. Generate pore network model based on a training image of a CT Scan (see image below). This image can be processed (Binarize or other function) and use black to define pore space and white to define sand grains.
2. Populate 3D grid based on geostatistical methods (sequential Gaussian simulation can be used). Excessive code writing can be avoided by connecting to an existing geostatistical library available in FORTRAN via MathLink.
3. Once the 3D pore network model is defined, we need to define collision rules. I suggest to use Lattice Boltzmann (D3Q19), using 19 directions for the collision/streaming rules.
4. Create a series of XY and XZ cross-sections to visualize bypassed oil.

Some challenges:

• Population of 3D grid to create pore network model.
• Implementation of Lattice Boltzmann and collision rules for 2 fluids (oil and water).
• Possible long run times. Can we do the calculations in C or Fortran via MathLink and return results to Mathematica?

Favorite Four-Color, Four State Turing Machine

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