Events

Speaker: Dr. Russell T. Johns, Professor of Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering, Pennsylvania State University

Title of Seminar: "Making Compositional Simulation Truly Compositional and Predictive"

Abstract: Current compositional simulators include compositional equation-of-state fluid models, but do not account for compositional effects on relative permeability, capillary pressure, and grid-block flux calculations. Relative permeability, for example, is still based on “old thinking” related to labeling of phases as “oil, gas, and water.” Labeling causes significant discontinuities that can result in inaccuracies and instability in simulations of compositional processes, such as those for enhanced oil recovery (EOR).

This seminar will show you the issues and possible fixes for relative permeability that should make it more continuous and predictive. The approach can be extended to make all petrophysical properties more predictive. Methods are illustrated to account for changes in relative permeability with hysteresis, capillary number variations, wettability changes, and variations in pore structure. Preliminary results with a “fully” compositional simulator are very promising and show significantly increased robustness, improved accuracy, rapid computational times, and less instabilities.

Biography: Russell T. Johns is the George E. Trimble Chair of Energy and Mineral Sciences at the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. He also holds the Energi Simulation Chair in Fluid Behavior and Rock Interactions. He recently served as Chair of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering Program from 2015 to 2018, and is currently the Editor-In-Chief for all SPE journals.

Prior to his current position, he served on the petroleum engineering faculty at The University of Texas at Austin from 1995 to 2010. He also has nine years of industrial experience as a petrophysical engineer with Shell Oil and as a consulting engineer for Colenco Power Consulting in Baden, Switzerland. He holds a BS degree in electrical engineering from Northwestern University and MS and PhD degrees in petroleum engineering from Stanford University. He has over 200 publications in enhanced oil recovery, thermodynamics and phase behavior, unconventional gas engineering, multiphase flow in porous media, and well testing. Dr. Johns received the SPE Ferguson medal in 1993, the SPE Distinguished Member award in 2009, the SPE Faculty Pipeline award in 2013, the 2016 SPE international award in Reservoir Description and Dynamics, and the Wilson Excellence in Research award from the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences in 2018. He is currently director of the Enhanced Oil Recovery consortium in the EMS Energy Institute at Penn State University.