Modeling impacts of subscale heterogeneities on dispersive solute transport in subsurface systems

The method is applied to model a tracer injection process. Results obtained from coarse-scale models, where reservoir properties and dispersivities are populated with the proposed approach, are compared to those obtained from fine-scale models. Our results verify that dispersivity increases with scale and demonstrate that (1) uncertainty distributions in recovery obtained by accounting for variability owing to scale-up capture the actual fine-scale behavior; and (2) ignoring sub-scale uncertainties would underestimate the ensuing uncertainty in recovery performance. An important contribution of this work is that it presents a quantitative and systematic procedure to scale-up both rock and flow-related properties. It reinforces the notion that deterministic conditioning data does not exist in reservoir modeling.