New Inflow Performance Relationship for solution-gas drive oil reservoirs

Abstract

Abstract The Inflow Performance Relationship (IPR) describes the behavior of the well׳s flowing pressure and production rate, which is an important tool in understanding the reservoir/well behavior and quantifying the production rate. The IPR is often required for designing well completion, optimizing well production, nodal analysis calculations, and designing artificial lift. Different IPR correlations exist today in the petroleum industry with the most commonly used models are that of Vogel׳s and Fetkovitch׳s, in addition to a few analytical correlations, that usually suffer from limited applicability. In this work, a new IPR model was developed based on actual field data for almost 50 field cases in addition to several simulated tests. This method is simple, covers wide range of reservoir parameters, easy to apply, and requires only one test point. Therefore, it provides a considerable advantage compared to the multipoint test method of Fetkovich. It also provides significant advantages over the widely used method of Vogel. (Comparison between the new method and Vogel shows that the new method is almost three times more accurate in our field tests database.) After the development of the new model, its accuracy was compared with the most common IPR models that can be computed with the readily available test and field data (Vogel, Fetkovitch, Wiggins, and Sukarno). Twelve field cases were used for comparison. The best two methods were our new model and that of Fetkovich׳s with average absolute error of 6.6% and 7%, respectively. However, the new method has the advantage of requiring only one test point as opposed to Fetknovich׳s which requires a multi-rate test. A method to compute future IPR performance was also developed and tested against field data with superior results to other available models. Finally, the application of the new model is illustrated with field examples for current and future IPR computations.