Abstract
Forecasting the performance of individual wells is of great importance to oil companies for continuous field production optimization and cost per barrel reduction. Well Performance is measured by evaluating the Inflow Performance & Outflow Performance Relationships (IPR & OPR). For that the need to use the correct IPR for subjected reservoir is very essential.
Since many decades, Vogel IPR equation has been used comprehensively for evaluating the productivity of vertical wells in saturated gas drive reservoirs. Vogel's model successfully evaluates IPR for single porosity solution gas drive in homogenous reservoirs. However, the applicability of Vogel's IPR for naturally fractured dual porosity-dual permeability reservoirs is questionable; hence this challenge is addressed by the industry only numerically. Due to composite fluid flow behavior between fracture and matrix system in a dual porosity-dual permeability reservoir, there is a pressing need for a new, practical and simple IPR model that takes into account the consideration of fracture parameters.
This study investigates the effects of reservoir complex fluid flow behavior on IPR curves for vertical wells drilled in naturally fractured oil saturated reservoirs resulting in the development of an IPR curve for such conditions. A base case simulation model is developed with typical reservoir, fluid and rock properties using black oil model. Using a set of points relating oil production rates to flowing bottom-hole pressures, the dimensionless IPR curves are generated. Fluid and reservoir properties were varied between two porous and permeable media such as Inter-porosity flow co-efficient, storativity ratio, oil gravity, reservoir thickness and bubble point pressure. Inter-porosity flow coefficient and fracture storativity ratio were found to have a significant impact on dimensionless IPR curves. Finally, an attempt is made to converge the results into one simple model using non-linear regression technique in order to get a new empirical IPR correlation for vertical well producing from naturally fractured oil reservoirs.
A small and acceptable average absolute error of less than 2% was found with the new proposed empirical IPR model, while comparing the existing published correlations on the same data gives more than 15% error. The developed IPR correlation is accurate enough and can serve as a handy tool for the production engineers to forecast the productivity of wells drilled in a naturally fractured dual porosity-dual permeability saturated oil reservoirs.
