A New Approach for Determining the Control Volumes of Production Wells considering Irregular Well Distribution and Heterogeneous Reservoir Properties

Abstract

The oil and gas fields are commonly developed with a group of production wells. Therefore, it can be essential for the industries to predict the performance of the production wells in order to optimize the development strategies. In practice, it frequently happens that we only hope to study the performance of a single production well. In such cases, it can be time consuming to run the reservoir simulation with the entire reservoir model to study the well performance. Hence, it can be preferred to determine the control volume (or drainage volume) of the target well from the entire reservoir and run the simulation with the small control volume to reduce the simulation cost. However, an irregular layout of the production wells and the heterogeneity of reservoir properties, which can be commonly observed in real field cases, can induce a stringent barrier for one to determine the control volumes. At present, we are still lacking a method to determine the control volumes of the production wells considering well distribution and reservoir heterogeneities. In order to overcome such a barrier, the authors proposed a new approach to divide the entire reservoir into small control volumes on the basis of the fast marching method (FMM). This approach is validated by comparing the simulation outputs of the target well calculated only with the determined control volume to those calculated with the entire reservoir model. The calculated results show that using the control volume that is determined with the proposed method to calculate the well performance can yield results that agree well with the results that are calculated with the entire reservoir model. This indicates that this proposed method is reliable to determine the control volume of the production wells. In addition, the calculated results in this work show that changing fracture length exerts a slight influence on the control volumes if the length of all fractures is increased, whereas, if only one of the fracture lengths is increased, the control volume of the corresponding well will be significantly increased. The number of the production wells and the distribution of the production well can noticeably influence the control volumes of the production wells. The findings of this study can help for optimizing the well spacing, estimating the ultimate recovery, and reducing the computational cost.