An Innovative ICD Design Workflow to Balance Flux Equalization and Well Productivity in Horizontal Wells

Lee, Byung Moo; Faizal, Syed Abu; Galimzyanov, Artyom

doi:10.2118/183957-ms

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 4 publications

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“…According to Li et al (2011), ICDs can be either beneficial or detrimental to production, strongly depending on the reservoir condition, well structure and ICD design. To Lee et al (2017), the additional pressure Uche et al 35 loss in an ICD completion will cause reduction of effective productivity of horizontal wells; in other words it will require lower flowing bottom-hole pressure for a well with ICD completion to produce the same liquid rate compared to a well without an ICD. They therefore said that the pressure of a reservoir where an ICD well is installed will require to be managed properly as part of a field development strategy since the well with an ICD will require a lower flowing bottomhole pressure to produce a desired off take rate.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimizing oil recovery using new inflow-control devices (ICDs) skin equation

Uche¹,

Obah²,

Onwukwe³

et al. 2019

J. Petroleum Gas Eng.

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Inflow-control devices (ICDs) were developed to avoid coning problems in long horizontal wells mainly in heterogenous formations, but cause some additional drawdown which does not contribute to rate increase. This rate reduction is seen to be impairment to the productivity of horizontal wells. Therefore, horizontal wells that are equipped with ICDs require a pre-quantification of their productivity by determining skin caused by each ICD nozzle size. This will help prevent additional expenditure that will be spent for a corrective horizontal well intervention. Many authors have proposed equations that can be used to estimate skin due to damage, partial completion, slanted well and perforation. No author has provided a skin equation that can be used to estimate recoverable and productivity loss that may result from the use of inflow control devices. In this work, a 3D numerical model which includes inflow control devices along horizontal wells was used to investigate reservoir and production performances of various ICD nozzle sizes. Different productivity losses from different nozzle sizes were seen as skin and a 0.002ft 2 ICD nozzle flow area estimated to have a zero skin. Consequently, a simple equation for calculating this skin due to restricted fluid entry through ICD nozzles was derived. The derived equation which shows insignificant deviation from skin equation is then used for selecting the right nozzle size for production and recovery optimization from horizontal wells.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimizing oil recovery using new inflow-control devices (ICDs) skin equation

Uche¹,

Obah²,

Onwukwe³

et al. 2019

J. Petroleum Gas Eng.

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An integration of the numerical and soft computing approaches for determining inflow control device flow area in water injection wells

Mostakhdeminhosseini,

Rafiei

2024

J Petrol Explor Prod Technol

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To avoid or mitigate the unwanted water and gas content, inflow control devices (ICDs) are designed and installed in the well to disturb the water and gas breakthrough which are trying to overtake the oil inflow, water and gas coning and sand production. Smart wells with permanent downhole valves such as ICDs are used to balance production and injection in wells. A paramount issue regarding using downhole control devices is determining the required cross-sectional area of them for control of the imposed pressure drop across the device to stabilize the fluid flow. Current methods for calculating the opening size of the ICDs are mainly based on sensitivity analysis of the ICD flow area or optimization algorithms coupled with simulation models. Although these approaches are quite effective in oil field cases, they tend to be time-consuming and require demanding system models. This paper presents a fast analytical method to determine the ICD flow area validated by a genetic algorithm (GA). Analytically, a closed-form expression is introduced by manipulating Darcy’s law applicable to multi-layer injection wells with different layer properties to balance the injection profile in the reservoir pay zone, based on equalizing injected front velocity in layers with different permeability. Considering various scenarios of analytical technique, GA optimization, and sensitivity analysis scenarios for ICD cross-sectional area determination, results for oil recovery, water production, water breakthrough time, and net present value (NPV) are discussed and compared. NPV values obtained by both analytical and GA approaches are virtually identical and greater than those of other scenarios. Compared to the base field case, the analytical method improved the oil recovery by almost 1%, reduced water production by almost 91%, and synchronized the water breakthrough time of high- and low-permeability layers (from a ratio of 1.76–1.06). The proposed analytical solution proved to be capable of providing desirable results with only one reservoir simulation run in contrast to GA and sensitivity analysis scenarios which require iterative simulation runs. The proposed analytical solution outperformed the GA as it is less computationally demanding in addition to its success in case of lowering water production for the field data. The findings of this study can help for a better understanding of the situation where water injection into the oil reservoir is problematic as the layers present different permeabilities which can induce problems such as early water breakthrough from the more permeable layer and hinder the success of the water injection process. Using ICDs and a faster and more accurate approach to calculate its cross-sectional area such as the analytical method that was used in this study can greatly increase the success rate of water injection in case of oil recovery and lower the amount of the produced water.

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A New ICD/ICV Well Completion Design Optimizer and Well Management Logic for Full Field Reservoir Simulation with Multiple ICD/ICV wells

Li¹,

Alobedli²,

Selvam³

et al. 2017

Day 4 Thu, November 16, 2017

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In the current practice, ICD/ICV design parameters (e.g., number of compartments, compartment size, number of nozzles, and nozzle sizes) are optimized by a manual trial-and-error approach that requires tens to hundreds of iterations. To make the design process efficient and effective, an automated optimizer is desired. In addition, as more and more ICD/ICV wells are completed, reservoir simulation faces a challenge on how to efficiently run full field models with multiple ICD/ICV wells. This paper presents a new automated ICD/ICV design optimizer and an efficient way to run full field reservoir simulation with hundreds of ICD/ICV wells. The new optimizer uses oil recovery efficiency as its objective function. The optimizer works on injectors and producers separately. For injectors, the optimizer adjusts the packer locations, number of nozzles, and nozzle sizes to make the injection velocity along the wellbore as uniform as possible to ensure a uniform injection front. For producers, a five step optimization process is applied. Step 1 is to generate injected fluid flow travel times in 3D from injectors to producers and all major flow "highways" are identified. Step 2, the optimizer uses fluid travel times in a producer to automatically estimate number of compartments needed and adjust the compartment boundaries (packers) to match the "highways" identified, estimate number of nozzles needed and initial nozzle sizes to maximize oil production rate. No reservoir simulation is required in steps 1 and 2. Step 3 is to run a full field reservoir simulation with all design wells to tune and achieve the final nozzle sizes. Step 4 is to QC and analyze the results of all ICD/ICV wells and select all successful candidates for the final step, i.e., step 5 reconciliation of the designs with all other drilling/completion constraints. The optimizer is fully supported by the efficient well management logic which accurately and efficiently links ICDs/ICVs with reservoir simulation. Using the well management logic removes the needs of coupling between well simulation tools (e.g., NETool) and reservoir simulation software, and then makes full field simulations efficient. The new optimizer and well management logic have been applied and demonstrated significant values in a giant oil field in UAE. Compared to the traditional one-well-at-a-time well design, the new optimizer optimizes multiple ICD/ICV design wells at a time and results in better and faster designs with speedups in a range of several factors to an order of magnitude. The optimization is global and within the context of full field model. Running 370 ICD/ICV wells with the well management logic for a multi-million-cell reservoir simulation model only slows down the full field simulation around 10%.

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An Innovative ICD Design Workflow to Balance Flux Equalization and Well Productivity in Horizontal Wells

Cited by 7 publications

References 4 publications

Optimizing oil recovery using new inflow-control devices (ICDs) skin equation

Optimizing oil recovery using new inflow-control devices (ICDs) skin equation

An integration of the numerical and soft computing approaches for determining inflow control device flow area in water injection wells

A New ICD/ICV Well Completion Design Optimizer and Well Management Logic for Full Field Reservoir Simulation with Multiple ICD/ICV wells

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