Estimating Sand Production Volume in Oil and Gas Reservoir

Abstract

Abstract Sand control techniques are widely used in industry to prevent sand production. However these techniques significantly increase completion cost and complexity as well as can potentially impact production and field economics. Hence it is preferred not to install sand control if one can be assured that the sand volume which will be produced is manageable. However, there are no tools or workflows which can consistently and accurately predict the expected sand volume and timing over the life of the field without a large range of uncertainty. In this study, sand production characteristics were tested in three different sandstone outcrops under varying fluid flow conditions. The test results show different sanding behavior for brine, oil, and gas flow. Samples tested with brine fail catastrophically when stress is applied which slightly exceeds the onset of sand production stress. Samples with gas flow produce small amounts of sand even when the stress significantly exceeds the onset of sand production. The test results also demonstrated the importance of drawdown pressure on sand production, where an increase in drawdown has the potential to significantly increase the sand production. Subsequently both numerical and empirical models were developed to estimate and predict sand production volume. These models have been able to model field sand production cases reasonably well