A New Parallel Reservoir Simulation Tool for the Production of Fractured Geothermal Reservoirs

Abstract

This paper describes the design, the development, the testing and the applications of a new parallel reservoir modelling research software package dedicated to the production of fractured geothermal reservoirs. The physical and mathematical models are described then the concepts and design principles of the C++ implementation are detailed with a focus on the performance issue. This research geothermal simulator prototype is based on a parallel computing framework providing advanced generic services to handle in at a high level the complexities related to parallelism, unstructured meshes and linear solvers. An innovative multiple interactive continua (MINC) flux modelling is used to efficiently simulate heat and fluid flows in fractured geothermal reservoirs. We present different formulations that enable to handle in a same simulation the regional, the reservoir and the well scales while recovering the short term transient state results and also the long term permanent state results. This model has been validated against problems set in the geothermal reservoir engineering code comparison project presented in 1980 and comparative results are presented. Examples of fractured reservoirs have also been simulated on the IFPEN heterogeneous computing cluster facility and the physical results and speedups are discussed.