Summary
Advanced drilling technology has been widely and successfully applied to
construct multilateral wells in reservoirs. This paper presents several field
applications of a generalized semianalytical segmented model accounting for
multilateral-well systems in commingled layered reservoirs. Cases include a
heavy-oil field, Al Rayyan oil field offshore Qatar, and Dos Cuadras field
offshore California.
The model can predict the production performance under either constant-rate
or constant-pressure conditions of a well system with any number of arbitrarily
oriented laterals of any length and nonuniform formation damage. The reservoir
layers, with different porosities, anisotropic permeabilities, and drainage
areas, are noncommunicating except through the wellbore. The solution is valid
for large reservoirs and when no-flow or constant-pressure boundaries affect
the pressure behavior.
Results of applying this method in the field cases showed that the model
enabled us to predict multilateral-well performance, to obtain information
about reservoir connectivity, and to estimate well and reservoir properties in
a multilayer system. Uncertainty caused by the large number of unknown
parameters in such a complex system represents the main challenge in using this
method. It is recommended to use other means together with pressure transient
data to reduce the uncertainty.
The presented model and the lessons learned from the field applications
provide engineers with a tool enabling the use of transient data collected from
multilateral wells in multilayer systems for reservoir characterization and
performance forecast.
© 2010. Society of Petroleum Engineers
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History
- Original manuscript received:
17 September 2009
- Meeting paper published:
24 March 2009
- Revised manuscript received:
22 June 2010
- Manuscript approved:
1 September 2010
- Published online:
3 December 2010
- Version of record:
9 December 2010
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