Updating the processes of long-term monitoring of production wells
Authors: Ipatov A.I. 
Published: September 2023

The development of West Siberian oil and gas fields in conditions of total horizontal completion of wells showed that technologically our industry was not sufficiently ready for this challenge. To quickly build high-tech horizontal wells, to carry out multistage hydraulic fracturing in them and at the same time effectively manage the operation of high-tech horizontal wells, to ensure the required degree of reserves development, unfortunately, is not the same thing...Despite the fact that the actual coverage of well-testing, production logging and alternative long-term distributed monitoring based on stationary information and measurement systems in Russia in recent years has been extremely insignificant, a cumulative analysis of the data obtained in the industry on the leading vertically integrated oil companies speaks about the following negative trends identified by diagnostic methods: the existing domestic technologies do not allow to regulate and manage the inflow and intake profiles in horizontal wells, horizontal wells with multistage hydraulic fracturing, multibarrel wells, thereby initially ensuring uniform production of recoverable oil and gas reserves in the drainage zones of wells with horizontal completion; the undesirable breakthroughs into the borehole of a horizontal well of water and gas detected by means of borehole diagnostics were eventually not isolated by field services, as a result of which the wells were decommissioned prematurely, without ensuring the achievement of the project accumulated indicators of hydrocarbon production; according to measurements in the horizontal wells, incomplete confirmability of multistage hydraulic fracturing designs was found (both in estimates of crack lengths and in terms of determining the places and forms of their initiation in holes); finally, the profiles of the inflow and the composition of the inflow studied in dynamics, as a rule, changed quite quickly in time from the moment the wells were launched for the selection of products, which usually led to unpredictable production losses (flow deterioration was usually recorded from the toe and the central parts of the boreholes of horizontal wells); the most typical reason for the decrease in productivity in horizontal wells and horizontal wells with multistage hydraulic fracturing should be recognized as the clogging of boreholes with sand and proppant, as well as the lack of the ability of producers to promptly clean the boreholes without creating repression on the formation; all these problems are certainly aggravated for objects of the category of hard-to-recover initial-recoverable reserves of hydrocarbon raw materials. The fixation and justification of the above conclusions were largely obtained due to the gradual transition of oil and gas producing and service companies from traditional one-time complex measurements by production logging and well testing to permanent long-term stationary monitoring of well testing and production logging parameters in production wells using various types of point-distributed and distributed modular means of stationary information and measurement systems. This progressive high-tech direction of borehole research can potentially be significantly developed and spread in the industry in the near future (which will objectively contribute to the achievement of higher oil and gas recovery coefficients), provided that the state bodies supervising the development of hydrocarbon raw materials (Rosnedra, Ministry of Energy of the Russian Federation) will involve measures to motivate a deeper and more detailed study of the state of development of residual recoverable reserves at the developed fields.