A segmenting method of long horizontal wellbore for staged sand control completion based on multi-dimension sequential clustering

Abstract

For horizontal well, the uniform measure of completion for sand control in the whole horizontal wellbore will cause local sand control failure or excessive sand control, even a decrease in production. An effective measure solved the problem is to segment long horizontal wellbore and conduct completion with staged sand control. In this paper, taking into consideration impacts of reservoir properties heterogeneity, the heel-toe effect of wellbore flow and the different distance between wellbore and water-oil contact (WOC) on sand production along long horizontal wellbore, the difference (CWP−pwf) between critical wellbore pressure of sanding onset (CWP) and wellbore flowing pressure (pwf)and water breakthrough time (T) of each micro section of horizontal wellbore are used to make up vector components and selected as segmenting indexes, further multi-dimension sequential clustering method is employed to segment horizontal wellbore according to the principle of location contiguity and similarity of CWP−pwf and T between micro intervals. Then the segmenting method for sand control completion together with water control in horizontal wells is proposed. Furthermore, the segmentation method is utilized in investigating staged sand and water control in TP65 well of T block in Shengli Oilfield, and the optimal number and location of segments for the well are given. This research can provide a new theoretical and quantitative method for staged sand control completion in horizontal well. And it also can be regarded as a fundamental platform to investigate other kinds of wellbore staging problems, such as staged fracturing.