Abstract
The main role of infill drilling is either adding incremental reserves to the already existing one by intersecting newly undrained (virgin) regions or accelerating the production from currently depleted areas. Accelerating reserves from increasing drainage in tight formations can be beneficial considering the time value of money and the cost of additional wells. However, the maximum benefit can be realized when infill wells produce mostly incremental recoveries (recoveries from virgin formations). Therefore, the prediction of incremental and accelerated recovery is crucial in field development planning as it helps in the optimization of infill wells with the assurance of long-term economic sustainability of the project. Several approaches are presented in literatures to determine incremental and acceleration recovery and areas for infill drilling. However, the majority of these methods require huge and expensive data; and very time-consuming simulation studies. In this study, two qualitative techniques are proposed for the estimation of incremental and accelerated recovery based upon readily available production data. In the first technique, acceleration and incremental recovery, and thus infill drilling, are predicted from the trend of the cumulative production (Gp) versus square root time function. This approach is more applicable for tight formations considering the long period of transient linear flow. The second technique is based on multi-well Blasingame type curves analysis. This technique appears to best be applied when the production of parent wells reaches the boundary dominated flow (BDF) region before the production start of the successive infill wells. These techniques are important in field development planning as the flow regimes in tight formations change gradually from transient flow (early times) to BDF (late times) as the production continues. Despite different approaches/methods, the field case studies demonstrate that the accurate framework for strategic well planning including prediction of optimum well location is very critical, especially for the realization of the commercial benefit (i.e., increasing and accelerating of reserve or assets) from infilled drilling campaign. Also, the proposed framework and findings of this study provide new insight into infilled drilling campaigns including the importance of better evaluation of infill drilling performance in tight formations, which eventually assist on informed decisions process regarding future development plans.
Highlights
World demand for energy is expected to increase by around 25% more than the current levels by 2040 (ExxonMobil 2017), and the trend of clean natural gas has been growing due to low C O2 emission (Al-Fatlawi et al 2017a; Esfahani et al 2015; Hefner 1993; Sadeq et al 2018).To meet this demand, the hydrocarbon industry has raised its investment in exploration and production operations
It is obvious that natural gas will continue to play its vital role in meeting the growing energy demand, remain as the most feasible option to minimize the greatest concerns of high emission from coal and/or oil, and play the vital role towards successful transitioning from the current high emission fossil-based energy to the green energy (Hafeznia et al 2017; Yang et al 2017)
This method was applied to a 3D model of Whicher Range tight gas reservoir, WA
Summary
World demand for energy is expected to increase by around 25% more than the current levels by 2040 (ExxonMobil 2017), and the trend of clean natural gas has been growing due to low C O2 emission (Al-Fatlawi et al 2017a; Esfahani et al 2015; Hefner 1993; Sadeq et al 2018).To meet this demand, the hydrocarbon industry has raised its investment in exploration and production operations. Two methods are presented to determine acceleration and incremental production based on the wells flow regimes.
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More From: Journal of Petroleum Exploration and Production Technology
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