A new streamline model for near-well flow validated with radial flow experiments

Abstract

Streamline simulation is a powerful tool that can be used for full field forecasting, history matching, flood optimization, and displacement visualization. This paper presents the development and the application of a new semi-analytical streamline simulation method in the nearwellbore region in polar/cylindrical coordinate systems. The main objective of this paper is to study the effects of the permeability heterogeneity and well completion details in the near-wellbore region. These effects dictate the streamline geometries, which in turn influence well productivity. Previous streamline applications used a constant flow rate for each stream tube. In this paper, streamline simulation is performed under the assumption of constant pressure boundaries, which is a novel and non-trivial extension of streamline simulation. Solutions are constructed by treating each stream tube as a flow unit by invoking analytical solutions for such geometries. In addition, visualization experiments are conducted to investigate the effect of the heterogeneity. Two-dimensional waterflooding visualization experiments in radial porous media are performed with constant pressure boundaries. The streamline simulator is applied to history match the relative permeabilities using these experiments, thereby validating the new near-well streamline method.

Streamline Tracing Methods Based on Piecewise Polynomial Pressure Approximations

“…In the scope of this paper, we consider a single‐phase flow problem in a porous medium subject to the following assumptions: fluid and porous medium are incompressible, gravity and capillary effects are negligible, and streamlines are traced in source‐/sink‐free grid blocks. For well grid blocks that contain point source/sink, a different numerical approach (Tang et al, ; Wang et al, ) or local refinement is required to obtain sufficient accurate results since velocity field varies significantly in the near‐well bore region. The fluid flow in the porous medium obeys Darcy's law, that is, where u is Darcy velocity, K is full tensor permeability, μ is viscosity, and P is pressure.…”