This reference is for an abstract only. A full paper was not submitted for this conference.
Gas condensate reservoirs exhibit a complex behavior when wells are produced below the dew point, due to the existence of a two-fluid system, reservoir gas and liquid condensate. Different mobility zones develop around the wellbore corresponding respectively to the original gas in place (away from the well),the condensate dropout, and capillarity number effects (close to the well).Condensate drop-out causes a nonreversible reduction in well productivity, which is compensated in part by capillarity number effects.
All these effects can be identified and quantified from well test data. Tests in condensate reservoirs, however, tend to be difficult to interpret. Build-up and/or drawdown data are usually dominated by wellbore phase redistribution effects and the main analysis challenge is to distinguish between reservoir effects, boundary effects, fluid behavior and wellbore phase redistribution perturbations.
The paper compares theoretical well test behaviors in vertical and horizontal wells as obtained from compositional simulation with actual behaviors selected from more than twenty different gas condensate reservoirs. An interpretation methodology is described, which uses time-lapse analyses with different analytical and numerical tools to identify the probable causes of the pressure data behavior: two-region and three-region analytical composite models to represent the various mobility zones around the wellbore; a voronoi-grid numerical simulator to represent discontinuous boundaries; a multilayered analytical simulator to account for the geological description, and a compositional simulator to verify the fluid behavior. It is shown that, in addition to the usual well test analysis results, it is possible to obtain parameters required for reservoir simulation and well productivity forecasting, such as gas relative permeabilities at the end point, critical oil saturation, and the base capillary number.
