Finite-Wellbore-Radius Solution for Gas Wells by Green's Functions

Abstract

Summary Even when written in terms of a pseudopressure function, the diffusivity equation for flow of gases through porous media is, rigorously speaking, nonlinear because the viscosity/compressibility product is pseudopressure-dependent. However, several techniques and analysis procedures neglect such nonlinearity. A new methodology for constructing solutions for gas reservoirs through the Green's-function (GF) technique was recently proposed in the literature. Such methodology handles the viscosity/compressibility product variation rigorously, and it was successfully applied to solve several gas-well-test problems. In those problems, the wellbore is always represented by a line source. This work extends the theory a little further by considering a finite-wellbore-radius (FWR) boundary condition for a single vertical well producing at constant rate from an isotropic homogeneous and infinite gas reservoir. The proposed solution does not consider non-Darcy-flow effects, wellbore storage, and skin. Results from our FWR solution are compared with a commercial finite-difference reservoir simulator that shows a very close agreement. We also compared the FWR solution to the correspondent line-source solution to study the difference between the two solutions. As expected, the pseudopressure solutions by use of line-source and FWR boundary conditions do not match at early times, but they do agree at long times, which is exactly how FWR and line-source well solutions for slightly compressible fluids behave. It seems that, even for gas-well problems, the wellbore can be satisfactorily represented by a line source without significant loss of generality. The line-source assumption greatly simplifies the mathematics and the computational effort. This aspect is especially attractive for complex nonlinear gas-well problems that remain to be solved by the GF approach.