Homogeneous effective permeabilities in the near-well region are generally obtained using analytical solutions for transient flow. In contrast, this paper focuses on heterogeneous permeability obtained from steady flow solutions, although extensions to unsteady flow are introduced too. Exterior calculus and its discretized form have been used as a guide to derive the system of algebraic equations. Edge-based vector potentials describing 3-D steady and unsteady flow without mass balance error stabilize the solution. After a physics-oriented introduction, relatively simple analytic examples of forward and inverse discrete modeling demonstrate the applicability.