Hybrid solvent- and thermal-based methods offer an important potential for reducing the environmental impact and enhancing recoveries in heavy oil production processes. Time-consuming compositional simulations of fine-scale models challenge the optimization of operational conditions. This work developed a flow-based upscaling workflow for simulating the warm solvent injection process in heterogeneous reservoirs. This process takes into account the pattern of spatial heterogeneity at different scales. A set of coarse-scale models was considered to be constructed to capture the subscale variability due to coarsening. In this study, scale-up of several static (porosity, permeability) and dynamic or transport parameters (dispersivities) was considered. In order to depict the spatial heterogeneity below the modeling scale, several realizations of sub-scale models of the modeling-scale cell size were created. The difference in the flow simulation responses of a heterogeneous realization and an equivalent average model was minimized to estimate effective longitudinal and transverse dispersivities. Results from all realizations were aggregated to construct the probability distributions of effective dispersivities. Field data of typical Athabasca bitumen reservoirs were used to generate a set of synthetic fine-scale models to test the workflow. The method is flexible, as no explicit assumption regarding the multivariate distribution of the heterogeneity is required. This paper extends our previous work, which focuses on solute transport in single-phase flow, to adopting this statistical scale-up framework for a complex hybrid solvent-thermal process.

混合溶剂法和热法为减少环境影响和提高重油生产过程中的采收率提供了重要的潜力。精细模型的耗时合成模拟挑战了操作条件的优化。这项工作开发了一种基于流动的放大工作流程，用于模拟非均质储层中的温溶剂注入过程。这个过程考虑了不同尺度的空间异质性模式。考虑构建一组粗尺度模型来捕捉由于粗化引起的亚尺度变化。在这项研究中，考虑了几个静态（孔隙度、渗透率）和动态或传输参数（分散性）的放大。为了描绘建模尺度以下的空间异质性，创建了建模尺度单元大小的子尺度模型的几种实现。异构实现和等效平均模型的流动模拟响应的差异被最小化，以估计有效的纵向和横向色散。汇总所有实现的结果以构建有效色散的概率分布。典型的 Athabasca 沥青储层的现场数据用于生成一组合成精细模型来测试工作流程。该方法是灵活的，因为不需要关于异质性的多元分布的明确假设。本文扩展了我们之前的工作，重点是单相流中的溶质传输，将这种统计放大框架用于复杂的混合溶剂 - 热过程。