Abstract
The Pinedale anticline is located in the Green River Basin of Southwestern Wyoming, USA. The field is the largest tight gas discovery for the onshore region of the United States in the last twenty years (Robinson and Shanley 2004). Gas production is from very tight, stacked clastic reservoirs that are Upper Cretaceous in age, with productive intervals in excess of 6000 feet. The large productive intervals require multiple hydraulic fracture stages to complete.
Time-lapsed production analyses are performed to optimize well spacing and to characterize the gas bearing reservoirs. Production logs are also run to determine the effectiveness of the hydraulic fracturing and to identify water entry points that may lead to premature completion failures. Typical wells produce relatively small amounts of water, usually less than 5 percent by volume.
It is nearly impossible to detect such small watercuts with conventional methods of production analysis. However, a probabilistic production analysis method simultaneously modeling flowmeter and temperature can take advantage of the high contrast between the heat capacity of gas and water and therefore provide good estimates of the water and gas production profiles, even in small watercut wells.
This paper describes the technique used to improve the production flow profiling, supporting its assertions with case study results.
