ERL FISH Seminar – Ali Dogru (Aramco)
Title: Large-Scale Numerical Simulation of Multiphase Flow in Porous Media
Abstract: This presentation will cover numerical simulation of formation of large basins with a large surface area around 5 million square kilometers using a 1 square kilometer simulation grid. Simulation model includes eight Middle East countries, covers six hundred thirty-two million years of history and three hundred vertical layers. The total number of active simulation cells is around three billion. Simulator runs on massively parallel computers. Numerical solution consists of solving two partial differential equations for water pressure and temperature implicitly and sequentially for every time step. Model equations are in three space dimensions including capillary and gravitational forces with full kinetics and simplified geomechanics. The parallel simulator runs on a supercomputer in less than 4 hours using 30 thousand cores. Model results are used to identify potential geothermal reservoirs, selecting locations for carbon dioxide (CO2) storage for injecting CO2 into saline aquifers, natural hydrogen accumulations as well as locating new unconventional gas reservoirs. This presentation will also include Reservoir Simulation examples of injection of Hydrogen into aquifers, Geothermal Reservoir Simulation, and injection of CO2 into a geothermal reservoir to recover heat for power generation. A brief description of mathematical formulation and numerical solutions will also be presented.
Biography: Ali Dogru is the Aramco Fellow and a member of US National Academy of Engineering (NAE).Dogru received his PhD in Petroleum Engineering/Applied Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1974. He spent his early career in academia : Research Associate at California Institute of Technology, Pasedena in Chemical Engineering, Assistant Prof at Mechanical Engineering at The university of Texas at Austin, Assistant Professor at Norwegian Institute of Technology in Petroleum Engineering, Trondheim. He joined Engineering Numeric Corp of Core Labs Inc, in Dallas, Texas in 1979. Then he joined Mobil R&D in 1982 in Dallas, Texas. In 1988, he transferred to Aramco 1996. He has been affiliated with MIT since 2011 and since 2018 is a Fellow at ERL.He presently leads Strategic Modeling Technology at Aramco.Dogru has published extensively and holds over thirty U.S. Patents. He has received SPE’s John Franklin Carll, Reservoir Description and Dynamics, Honorary & Distinguished Membership and World Oil’s Innovative thinker awards.His current research is focused on developing next-generation parallel reservoir and basin simulators, modeling of CO2 sequestration and Hydrogen Storage in porous media.
Aboout the series: The MIT Earth Resources Laboratory’s Friday Informal Seminar Series (FISH) features talks by our lab members as well as special guests from academia and the energy industry on our areas of interest including geothermal energy, carbon sequestration, machine learning for geophysics, multiphase flow, subsurface imaging, and uncertainty quantification. Titles and abstracts will be posted here when available. For more info or Zoom password please contact erl-info@mit.edu.
