We often hear the Reservoir Engineers talking about Black-Oil model and Compositional Model. What are these? How do they compare?
All these are different fluid model or the part of numerical simulation model that handles how the fluids, that is, oil, water, gas and any other substances would behave at different pressure and temperature.
Black Oil model is relatively simpler model with only three fluids - oil, water and gas.
An extended version of Black-Oil model, called Extended Black Oil model takes are of volatile oil in gas and dissolved gas in oil.
A Compositional Model on the other, tracks any number of components the fluid might actually has - like different hydrocarbons (C1, C2, C3, C4. C5, C6, C7,... etc), H2S, CO2, Water etc. These models are complex and takes lot more computing time than Black-Oil models.