Overview

In some of the oil and gas industry’s most demanding field developments, engineers can spend months preparing a test program for a deepwater subsea completion that could cost millions of dollars to execute. Other innovative operators are able to convince management of the benefit to drilling horizontal wells to determine pressure profiles through a prolific, yet complicated, reservoir. Conversely, in marginal fields, many wells may not have been tested for years and may never be tested before they are disposed of in the next asset sale.

Clearly, opportunity, mitigating risk in frontier areas, lack of technical resources, and other justifications play a role in the frequency and type of well-testing operations that an engineer will recommend. In my own experience, it can be difficult to convince operations personnel that a good testing program can increase production by identifying underperforming wells for remedial programs or more nearly optimum operating practices. Our role as engineers is to use our education, judgment, and experience to make decisions that provide the highest-value information at the lowest possible cost to our project. The SPE technical-paper library provides a great resource of where this has been done by some of our industry’s top technical people.

The papers reviewed for this month’s well-testing feature were some of the most interesting and varied in the time I have been on the JPT Editorial Committee. There were many more technical papers I could have chosen this year that offer real applicability to the practicing field engineer and just as many that would interest those doing research. The papers that were selected represent progress in areas of well-test interpretation that have been problematic in the past. There also are reviews of advanced well-test-interpretation methods that should be a great resource to many. Also discussed are new ways of applying well-development technology to answer questions about optimizing an entire field’s development plan.

I would encourage anyone with the slightest interest in well testing to do a thorough literature search to take advantage of the many well-written papers on a broad variety of well-testing topics that have been published this year. Even in our robust and high-oil-price environment, we find persistent pressure to do more with less. I found the technical papers reviewed this year to be of very practical interest to the well-test designer and interpreter interested in maximizing the information that can be extracted from well testing. Good reading.

Boundary Effects and Depth of Investigation From Long Buildups Following Short Flow Tests

4D-Pressure Pilot Determines Well Spacing in Tight Gas

Explicit Deconvolution of Wellbore-Storage-Distorted Well-Test Data

Jay Stratton, SPE, is Production Engineering Manager for International Operations & Frontier Exploration in the London office of Anadarko Petroleum. Previously, he was Production Engineering Manager for Groupement Berkine in Anadarko’s Partnership with Sonatrach in Hassi Messaoud, Algeria, and focused on production optimization, stimulations, and field development. Stratton also has worked for Occidental Petroleum of Qatar and Arco Alaska. In his 20-year career, he has worked in the Arctic, North Africa, Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Pakistan, and west Texas. Stratton has authored technical papers on the application of multilateral completions and polymer water-control technology. He holds a BS degree in Petroleum Engineering from Texas A&M U. and serves on the JPT Editorial Committee.

Overview

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