The invention investigates the effects of
reservoir heterogeneity on IPR curves for
horizontal wells drilled in heterogeneous solution gas drive reservoirs. To achieve the desired objective, a commercial simulator
Eclipse is utilized to develop IPRs for
horizontal wells producing oil from solution gas drive reservoirs. Firstly, a
simulation model is developed where a base case is considered with typical rock, fluid and reservoir properties using a
black oil model. Dimensionless IPR curves are generated by obtaining a set of points relating to flowing bottom-hole pressures to
oil production rates. The effects of several reservoir and fluid properties such as bubblepoint pressure, oil gravity,
residual oil saturation, critical gas saturation, initial
water saturation,
porosity and absolute permeabilities on the calculated curves are investigated.
Reservoir heterogeneity is included in the
simulation model by incorporating a semi-
variogram function. Finally, a new single empirical IPR model is obtained for
horizontal wells producing oil from heterogeneous solution gas drive reservoirs suitable for systems with different reservoir permeability. The new empirical IPR model is then compared to published correlations and is found to have a small and acceptable average absolute error of less than 2%. Furthermore, the invention also shows that
bubble point pressure has significant effect on dimensionless IPR curves. However, plots for other properties indicate that although the curves are not identical, they are similar in shape and demonstrate much less variance than the
bubble point pressure plot. Therefore, these properties have only a minor effect on calculated, dimensionless IPR curves.