Decoupled overlapping grids for the numerical modeling of oil wells

Accurate computation of time-dependent well bore pressure is important in well test analysis – a branch of petroleum engineering where reservoir properties are estimated by comparing measured pressure responses at an oil well to results from a mathematical model. Similar methods are also used in groundwater engineering. In this paper we present the new approach of decoupled overlapping grids for accurately computing timedependent pressure at the oil well. Our method is implemented in two stages: a global stage with a simple point or line source well approximation, and a local post-process stage with the well modelled correctly as an internal boundary. We investigate the accuracy of our method for a representative 2D problem in both homogeneous and heterogeneous isotropic domains, and compare our results with the widely used Peaceman well index solution (in the homogeneous case), and the approximate solution on locally refined grids. We also present a theoretical analysis that explains the observed O(h2) behaviour of the error in our method for the homogeneous case.