Characterization of Reservoir Heterogeneity by Capacitance-resistance Model in Water-flooding Projects

Tedious calculations and simulations are needed to obtain an efficient production scenario and/or proper field development strategy. Capacitance-resistance model (CRM) is proved to be a fast reservoir simulation tool using just the field-available data of production and injection rates. This approach sets a time-constant and a weighting factor (or well-pair connectivity parameter) between each pair of injection and production wells according to their histories. In this study, we investigated the behavior of the CRM parameters in synthetic reservoir models with different porosity and permeability maps. Four reservoirs are considered with different porosities and permeabilities to study their effects on CRM response. We defined a new parameter, named error to mean production ratio (EMPR), to analyze the CRM performance. Some fluctuations are exerted on the production data to evaluate the capability of CRM against variable production records. Porosity showed a stronger effect on CRM parameters than the permeability based on the calculated EMPR. Unstable production history would result in large error which can be corrected with some smoothing techniques on variable production data. Also, a linear trend of EMPR was obtained with the change of porosity and permeability or a combination of the two parameters within the reservoir.