A Simple Physics-Based Model Predicts Oil Production from Thousands of Horizontal Wells in Shales
Type
Conference PaperKAUST Department
Ali I. Al-Naimi Petroleum Engineering Research Center (ANPERC)Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division
Earth Science and Engineering Program
Energy Resources and Petroleum Engineering
Physical Science and Engineering (PSE) Division
Date
2017-10-09Online Publication Date
2017-10-09Print Publication Date
2017Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/626050
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Over the last six years, crude oil production from shales and ultra-deep GOM in the United States has accounted for most of the net increase of global oil production. Therefore, it is important to have a good predictive model of oil production and ultimate recovery in shale wells. Here we introduce a simple model of producing oil and solution gas from the horizontal hydrofractured wells. This model is consistent with the basic physics and geometry of the extraction process. We then apply our model thousands of wells in the Eagle Ford shale. Given well geometry, we obtain a one-dimensional nonlinear pressure diffusion equation that governs flow of mostly oil and solution gas. In principle, solutions of this equation depend on many parameters, but in practice and within a given oil shale, all but three can be fixed at typical values, leading to a nonlinear diffusion problem we linearize and solve exactly with a scalingCitation
Patzek TW, Saputra W, Kirati W (2017) A Simple Physics-Based Model Predicts Oil Production from Thousands of Horizontal Wells in Shales. SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.2118/187226-MS.Sponsors
This work was supported by the baseline and center funding at the Ali I. Al-Naimi Center for Petroleum Engineering Research (ANPERC) at the King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We would like to thank Dr. Arthur Berman of Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc. in Houston, Texas, for pointing out the multitudinous problems with allocation of oil well production in Texas, and working through a difficult example in DrillingInfo with Wardana and Wissem. Art visited us in November 2016.Publisher
Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE)Additional Links
https://www.onepetro.org/conference-paper/SPE-187226-MSae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.2118/187226-MS