InterPore2026

Capturing Near-Well Effects in Formation Damage Modeling for Reservoir Simulation

19 May 2026, 09:50

1h 30m

Poster Presentation (MS14) Advanced Flow Physics in Specialized Porous Systems: Non-linear dynamics and finite-size effects Poster

Speaker

Dr Sarah Eileen Gasda (NORCE Research AS)

Description

Water reinjection is a widely employed practice in hydrocarbon reservoirs to maintain pressure and enhance recovery efficiency. However, one of the major operational challenges is the loss of injectivity caused by particle accumulation in the near-wellbore region. At the pore scale, this phenomenon has been attributed to mechanisms such as particle bridging, successive deposition, and mechanical entanglement, which collectively lead to pore blockage and jamming (Tongtong et al., 2025). These processes not only reduce injection efficiency but also contribute to increased energy consumption and operational costs. Numerical simulations provide valuable insights into the complex interactions between suspended particles and reservoir rock surfaces during reinjection. Such modeling approaches are instrumental in designing optimized injection strategies aimed at mitigating particle-induced formation damage and preserving long-term injectivity.

In reservoir simulators, grid sizes are typically defined on the order of meters, since reservoir models often span several kilometers laterally and hundreds of meters vertically. As a result, the effect of particle accumulation around injection wells, commonly referred to as filter cake formation, is usually incorporated by modifying the skin factor in the well model. These modifications are based on assumptions regarding factors such as the geometry of flow (for example, linear or radial) and the porosity of the filter cake. While parameter calibration during history-matching exercises can improve agreement with observed data, forecasts derived from such simplified models may be unreliable. This limitation arises because the coarse grid resolution fails to capture pore-scale and near-wellbore effects, which leads to an oversimplification of the complex mechanisms governing injectivity impairment.

The objective of this work is to develop a framework for field-scale simulations that incorporate particle accumulation effects derived from near-wellbore processes. In this approach, the fluid is represented as a single-phase liquid system with two components, water and particles. Trapped particles are treated as a solid phase attached to the rock matrix, which grows as additional particles are deposited and can be rearranged under the influence of flow. The mathematical formulation is implemented in the industry-standard reservoir simulator Open Porous Media (OPM) Flow (Rasmussen et al., 2019).

We apply the proposed model to evaluate injectivity loss under varying injection strategies and particle concentrations. The results are compared with the analytical filter cake models available in OPM Flow (Goodfield et al., 2025), highlighting both the advantages and limitations of these simplified approaches. For the simulations, we employ the pyopmnearwell tool (Landa-Marbán and von Schultzendorff, 2023), an open-source framework that generates the necessary input files for OPM, including corner-point grids, saturation function tables, and injection schedules, through configuration files. This workflow ensures reproducibility of the results and facilitates further studies such as history matching and optimization. The methodology is designed to align with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles (Wilkinson, 2016), which have not been consistently adopted in recent years (Liu et al., 2025), yet remain essential for advancing reservoir simulation technology.