Novel optimization method for production strategy of coal-bed methane well: Implication from gas-water two-phase version productivity equations

Abstract

To date, the development of coalbed methane (CBM) reservoirs has attracted a great deal of attention due to its considerable perspective reserves. As a result, nearly all research aspects of CBM reservoirs have been extensively investigated and expect to advance gas production performance as well as associated economic value. Notably, amongst the most significant issue influencing the production performance is the production strategy optimization, which however remains challenging because of the complex time-varying fluid flow performance during the development process of CBM reservoirs. It is always difficult but crucial to shed light on the optimal drawdown pressure within different production scenarios. According to the gas-water two-phase version productivity equations which have been proposed in our previous work, a set of quantified optimization criterion for production strategy within the entire CBM well production process is developed for the first time in this research paper. The proposed optimization criterion contains three procedures: (1) the gas well maintains the bottom-hole pressure (BHP) as critical desorption pressure until the pressure wave propagate to the boundary; (2) the BHP is set as the critical pressure, which is firstly proposed herein and determined by gas phase productivity equation, until the pressure at the boundary become below the critical desorption pressure; (3) the gas well maintains the BHP as the abandonment pressure. In order to clarify the validity of the proposed criterion, we applied the optimization criterion to an actual CBM well located in Hancheng field, China, and found the case with optimized production strategy achieved much better gas recovery compared with that based on the previous production strategy. Moreover, production evaluation work is performed based on the utilization of the proposed optimization method, it indicates that optimized gas production can attain relatively high gas production rate in the future three years. The optimization method possesses simple and easy-operation advantages, which shares great application potential in actual CBM fields and turns out to be practical. In addition, because a practical optimization method for scheduling production strategy of CBM wells has not been proposed before, this work is able to fill the knowledge gap and will contribute to the efficient development of CBM reservoirs.