Open Access

ARTICLE

A Model for the Connectivity of Horizontal Wells in Water-Flooding Oil Reservoirs

by Chenyang Shi^1,2,3, Fankun Meng^1,2,3,*, Hongyou Zhang⁴, HuiJiang Chang⁴, Xun Zhong^1,2,3, Jie Gong^1,2,3, Fengling Li⁵

1 Cooperative Innovation Center of Unconventional Oil and Gas (Ministry of Education & Hubei Province), Yangtze University, Wuhan, 430100, China
2 School of Petroleum Engineering, Yangtze University, Wuhan, 430100, China
3 Key Laboratory of Drilling and Production Engineering for Oil and Gas, Wuhan, 430100, China
4 Tianjin Branch of CNOOC, Ltd., Tianjin, 300459, China
5 Oilfield Technology Service Company, Xinjiang Oilfield Company, PetroChina, Karamay, 834000, China

* Corresponding Author: Fankun Meng. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Meshless, Mesh-Based and Mesh-Reduction Methods Based Analysis of Fluid Flow in Porous Media)

Fluid Dynamics & Materials Processing 2022, 18(5), 1441-1468. https://doi.org/10.32604/fdmp.2022.019788

Received 15 October 2021; Accepted 02 December 2021; Issue published 27 May 2022

Abstract

As current calculation models for inter-well connectivity in oilfields can only account for vertical wells, an updated model is elaborated here that can predict the future production performance and evaluate the connectivity of horizontal wells (or horizontal and vertical wells). In this model, the injection-production system of the considered reservoir is simplified and represented with many connected units. Moreover, the horizontal well is modeled with multiple connected wells without considering the pressure loss in the horizontal direction. With this approach, the production performance for both injection and production wells can be obtained by calculating the bottom-hole flowing pressure and oil/water saturation according to the material balance equation and a saturation front-tracking equation. Some effort is also provided to optimize (to fit known historical production performances) the two characteristic problem parameters, namely, the interwell conductivity and connected volume by means of a SPSA gradient-free algorithm. In order to verify the validity of the model, considering a heterogenous reservoir, three conceptual examples are constructed, where the number ratio between injection and production wells are 1/4, 4/1 and 4/5, respectively. It is shown that there is a high consistency between simulation results and field data.

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