Commingled Well Test Analysis (CWTA) and its Application to Assess Health of Multiphase Flow Meters (MPFM) for Deep Water Conventional Assets

Abstract

Abstract Historically well production flow surveillance has been attracting attention from reservoir engineers. The accurate estimation of individual well contribution, Has profound impact on reservoir management. Often production allocation suffers from multiple issues such as quality of available production data and production rate estimation in case of inaccurate and uneconomical measurements. These issues can be mitigated if the well has accurate, calibrated Multiphase Flow Meters (MPFMs) and Virtual Flow Meters (VFMs). Reliability of digital meters is primarily dependent on regular well testing to keep the model updated and tuned to latest reservoir characteristics. As an industry wide common practice, well tests are performed in a timely manner to ensure to allocate production accurately to each well. But performing solo well tests for subsea wells is not trivial as it may seem. Differed production due to downtime associated with flowing subsea wells to a test separator and inability of mature wells to flow to the test separator result in additional challenges. Under such situations, commingled well tests are performed to estimate well rates. Individual well rates can be estimated using test by difference (TBD) method. The apparent simplicity of the TBD method often results in incorrect estimation of allocation rates as the test conditions and production conditions differs significantly. As a result, the credibility of the forecast and the ability to optimize production are compromised. In this paper a novel application called Commingled Well Test Analysis (CWTA) is reviewed which addresses these aforementioned issues. This integrated application comprises of data loading interface, data visualization interface, core optimization engine and an interactive user interface. To demonstrate the capability, three wells from a deep water conventional wells are analyzed using commingled well tests and well performance parameters (PI, WCUT and GOR) are obtained. Based on the tuned parameters, well rates are predicted and compared against rates obtained from sales meter and MPFM meters. As per the comparison, well allocation rates are validated and health of MPFM meters are assessed. As an additional benefit, proper designing of commingled well tests enable in 25-30% time savings of well testing.