A novel method for predicting gas/oil flow rate from temperature log data

highlights
• A novel method predicting gas/oil flow rate by temperature log data was presented.
• A production well heat transfer model considering wellbore heat capacity was built.
• Error rate of flow rate estimation is less than 10% with the presented method.

Gas/oil flow rate of production well is an important parameter for evaluating oilfield production. This study presents an effective inversion method for estimating the flow rate from temperature log data, and the proposed method is based on the temperature-flow rate model of production well. Therefore, a novel heat transfer model for production well with consideration of wellbore heat capacity is built first to obtain the temperature-flow rate model. Then sensitivity analysis is applied to investigation of the correlation between the flow rate and fluid temperature for the inversion method. Lastly, the inversion method is used to estimate the flow rate as well as thermal conductivity of three production wells with study on the difference between the entire-wellbore and single-point inversion method. Analyses of results show that the entire-wellbore method tends to be more accurate to estimate flow rate with relative error less than 10%, while the single-point method shows lower error at the middle-points of wellbore for flow rate estimation. Furthermore, the estimated fluid temperature also agrees well with the temperature log data.