June 2022: Dynamic Adaptivity for Coupled Flow and Geomechanics in Unconventional Reservoirs
Channel: Texas CSEE
Date: 2022-06-15

Mary Fanett Wheeler is an expert in computational science. She has been a member of the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin since 1995 and holds the Ernest and Virginia Cockrell Chair in the departments of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, and Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering. She is also director of the Center for Subsurface Modeling (CSM) at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. Before joining the faculty at UT Austin, Dr. Wheeler was the Noah Harding Professor in engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and was the first tenured female associate and full professor in engineering at Rice. Dr. Wheeler has served on numerous NSF, DOE, and DOD committees.  For seven years she was the university lead in the DOD User Productivity Enhancement and Technology Transfer Program (PET) in environmental quality modeling.  Dr. Wheeler has served on the Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratory and advisory committees for Argonne, Oak Ridge, and Pacific National  Laboratories. In 1998, Dr. Wheeler was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. In 2006, she received an honorary doctorate from Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in the Netherlands. In 2008, she received an honorary doctorate from the Colorado School of Mines. In 2009, Dr. Wheeler was honored with the SIAM Geosciences Career Prize, as well as her third IBM Faculty Award. That same year, she was awarded the Theodore von Kármán Prize at the SIAM national meeting. In 2010, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2011, she received a Humboldt award. In February 2013, Dr. Wheeler was selected to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Society for Porous Media, InterPore. In May 2013, Dr. Wheeler received the John von Neumann Medal award from the United States Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM). In 2014 she was awarded Honorary Member by the Society of Petroleum Engineers, the highest award bestowed by this society. In 2016, she received the ICES Moncrief Award, and in 2017 the University Co-Op Hamilton Book Award. In 2020, she received the Billy & Claude R. Hocott Distinguished Centennial Engineering Research Award.

Coupled multiphase flow, geochemistry, and geomechanics models are receiving growing research interests for applications in unconventional reservoirs that include geological CO2 sequestration, geothermal, and recently hydrogen storage.  These multiphysics and multiscale simulations are computationally expensive and require the preservation of physics, chemistry, and biology across spatial and temporal scales.  In addition, these algorithms must be able to handle efficiently high-performance computing, adaptive mesh refinement, and highly nonlinear algebraic systems with rough coefficients. Additional computational issues include data extraction, optimization, uncertainty quantification, and machine learning.  In this presentation, we discuss two high-fidelity approaches that have been introduced for unconventional reservoirs that show promise for modeling reservoir energy production: a posteriori error estimation for coupling of multiphase and geomechanics and space-time modeling for multiphase flow. In this presentation, we also discuss a fully implicit space-time multiscale scheme to improve computational efficiency in solving nonlinear multiphase flow in porous media. Here, error estimators are used for adaptively changing the spatial-temporal mesh.  This is followed by applying local fine timesteps to these marked regions, whereas the remaining regions retain the coarse time scale. Once a temporal discretization is determined for different parts of the reservoir, the spatial mesh is refined for treating saturation fronts. The nonmatching interfaces arising from different temporal and spatial scales are resolved by the enhanced velocity method; the efficiency of this approach is demonstrated for black oil systems.