A production forecasting model for gas wells

Abstract

Predicting the performance of gas wells has always been of considerable importance to the natural gas industry. The accurate determination of the future production rates from gas wells, however, requires a great number of data which are not often available. This paper introduces a forecasting method which can provide reliable estimates of future production rates based on the limited data. This method has the advantage of considering a number of parameters and conditions which are usually ignored in other forecasting methods. They include well damage, line pressure changes, installation of a compressor, and the number of producing wells. The forecasting method has been developed based on a general model which accounts for the variations of pressure-dependent gas properties as well as non-linear laminar gas flow in the porous media (non-Darcy flow). The model has been evaluated against the actual production data from several gas wells and has been found to be very reliable.