An Effective Numerical Simulation Method for Steam Injection Assisted In Situ Recovery of Oil Shale

Abstract

This paper presents an effective numerical simulation method for production prediction of in situ recovery of oil shale reservoirs with steam injection. In this method, finite volume‐based discretization schemes of heat and mass transfer equations of the thermal compositional model are derived and used. The embedded discrete fracture model is used to accurately handle the fractured vertical well. A smooth non‐linear solver is proposed to solve the global equations, then cell pressure, temperature, saturation, component mole fractions, and well production rates can be obtained. Compared with the existing commercial software, this new method can have a smoother non‐linear solution and handle the complex fracture geometry theoretically. A numerical example is used to test this presented method and can realize accurate calculation results compared with CMG. Another numerical case with a hydraulic fracture and an open thermal boundary condition is implemented to validate the presented method and can effectively handle the actual situation of steam injection‐assisted in situ recovery of oil shale, which was difficult to handle using previous methods.