Smoothing of Well Rates in Subsurface Hydrocarbon Reservoir Simulators

Abstract

A common problem in reservoir simulators is the history matching problem, where a number of wells are operated at a prescribed flow rate, measured by the operator. The data provides input to a simulator which then has to match various other measured quantities, such as pressure drop at wells, movement of saturation fronts, water break-out and other. A common problem is that the input data is very rough and if input directly would cause considerable numerical difficulties, such as excessive Newton iterations to converge or excessively small time-steps.