Abstract
The characteristics evaluation of a well and associated cost of operation can be critical aspects to effectively and efficiently developing and operating hydrocarbon wells. A well operator may consider many factors that can influence the effective and efficient development of a well, such as physical damage to the formation. This influence on the permeability is often referred to as "skin damage". The skin for a wellbore extending into a formation may include a dimensionless measure of pressure drop caused by flow restriction in the near-wellbore region of the formation. Unfortunately, the skin of a well can increase over the life of the well, which can negatively impact production performance of the well. In some instances, remediation operations, such as stimulations, are conducted on a well to reduce the well's skin in an effort to improve the well's production performance.
Provided are systems and method for analyzing hydrocarbon wells based on field historical skin profiles as well as the predicted post job gain based on field performance decline factor. It provides dynamic calculation of well skin, based on rate tests and other wellhead and reservoir parameters, to evaluate candidates for production enhancements jobs such as acid stimulation.
The innovation is a novel development which is executable by a processor to prioritize performance enhancement job candidates, based on dynamic update of formation damage to specify observed well performance and then it performs a comparison analysis between candidates based on projection of post job performance and added value. Several patents were filed to design this system and provide a platform to all future performance evaluation and enhancement to optimize operational cost and maximize additional profit.
This paper will present a system along with prototype example that is designed to perform the following operations for developing a hydrocarbon well, determining a skin increase threshold for a given period of time; for each of two or more hydrocarbon wells, identifying the hydrocarbon well as a candidate well for performance enhancement, predict production flow rate of the hydrocarbon well that corresponds to skin of zero, identifying cost of operation per barrel gained for the hydrocarbon well based on the predicted production flow rate, and determining, based on the estimated field performance decline factor, a marginal production gain in a dollar value.
