An Investigation into Sub-Critical Choke Flow Performance in High Rate Gas Condensate Wells

Abstract

There have been some correlations in the literature to predict the gas and liquid flow rate through wellhead chokes under subcritical flow conditions. The majority of these empirical correlations have been developed based on limited production data sets that were collected from a small number of fields. Therefore, these correlations are valid within the parameter variation ranges of those fields. If such correlations are used elsewhere for the prediction of the subcritical choke flow performance of the other fields, significant errors will occur. Additionally, there are only a few empirical correlations for sub-critical choke flow performance in high rate gas condensate wells. These led the authors to develop a new empirical correlation based on a wider production data set from different gas condensate fields in the world; 234 production data points were collected from a large number of production wells in twenty different gas condensate fields with diverse reservoir conditions and different production histories. A non-linear regression analysis method was applied to their production. The new correlation was validated with a new set of data points from some other production wells to confirm the accuracy of the established correlation. The results show that the new correlation had minimal errors and predicted the gas flow rate more accurately than the other three existing models over a wider range of parameter variation ranges.

Keywords

• choke performance
• sub-critical flow
• critical flow
• non-linear regression
• error analysis
• gas condensate
• well
• empirical correlations