A New Method for Production–Data Analysis and Well Testing by Use of Superposition Rate

Abstract

Summary This research presents a new method to analyze production- and well-test data: the superposition rate. The method was developed from the well-accepted superposition principle. It is presented in a generalized form and is applicable to data in transient flow (including radial, linear, and bilinear), as well as in boundary-dominated flow (BDF). The superposition-rate method is validated by synthetic data generated from reservoir modeling. Moreover, a practical work flow of implementing the superposition rate in production-data and well-test analysis is presented. Finally, real-field examples are used to demonstrate the practicality of superposition rate. A comparison between the superposition-rate and superposition-time methods is presented. The superposition rate shows advantages over the superposition time. A key improvement of the superposition rate in quality diagnostics and data analysis is that it does not modify time scale. Consequently, the superposition rate keeps all production data in the sequence of their occurrence.