Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
1754581 Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 2016 12 Pages PDF
Abstract

•Rescaled exponential models extended to multiphase environments.•Enables multiphase well performance analysis without pseudo-time calculations.•Performance verified analytically and against numerically-generated solutions.

Well performance forecasting is an important analytical technique used for field development to guide economic decisions during the life of a reservoir. For the case of dry and liquid-rich gas wells, traditional well performance models are developed based on solving the resultant highly nonlinear gas flow equations via pseudo-pressure and pseudo-time linearization. In this study, we provide a straightforward, density-based alternative to traditional models. We show, as done previously for the case of dry gas wells (Ayala H. and Zhang, 2013 and Zhang and Ayala, 2014a), that a rescaled exponential model is a rigorous decline solution that can be extended to liquid-rich gas wells producing under constant bottomhole-flowing-pressure (BHP) during boundary-dominated flow (BDF) and multiphase conditions. The proposed multiphase rescaled-exponential model is derived analytically from governing multiphase flow equations; comparisons between numerically simulated results and proposed analytical model for a variety of combinations of reservoir and fluid properties demonstrate that the proposed rescaled-exponential model is a valid and reliable forecast model for constant-BHP liquid-rich gas wells under BDF.

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Physical Sciences and Engineering Earth and Planetary Sciences Economic Geology
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