Many deepwater wells experience steep productivity declines. On the basis of field observations, this decline is partly attributed to fines-migration effects. The complete paper presents a numerical work flow to simulate the effect of flow-induced fines migration on production decline over time in deepwater reservoirs. This work flow will help reservoir engineers to predict the damage caused by fines migration, predict production decline, and plan remediation.

Introduction

Although there are generally two causes of fines mobilization (or release), chemical (colloidal) and mechanical (hydrodynamical or flow), the complete paper focuses only on the mechanically induced fines migration, in which fines are mobilized by increasing flow velocity. As with chemically induced fines, there is a critical flow velocity at which fines are mobilized.

Previous studies focused on characterizing fines-migration processes by use of intricate mathematical models and adjustment of modeling parameters to match laboratory results. These models are mathematically complex and computationally expensive usually, which means they are applicable only to 1D simulation. To solve engineering problems, reservoir engineers need to perform realistic simulation on complex 3D geometries.