Well Completion Data Adjustment Workflow for Reservoir Simulation
Authors: Ismael Menhal , Khawaja Hussain , Nahdi U , Akhtar Muhammad Nadeem 
Published: March 2015

Oil and gas well completion approaches vary across different types of practices. The configuration of a well completion depends on the nature of the reservoir and the complexity of its properties. Nowadays, with the availability of advanced strategies and tools, well modeling is getting more sophisticated with the targeting of very challenging reservoir pay zones. Advancements in well completion technology are way ahead of what current reservoir simulators can handle. The details of both old and new well completion technology must be used in simulation calculations to have accurate reservoir simulation results. Moreover, massive amounts of well completion data is available in the corporate database in addition to several simulation applications having different capabilities. This makes it challenging to represent valid well models correctly in reservoir simulation processing applications. Furthermore, well data transmission from the database to reservoir simulation applications undergoes many stages including data fetching, quality checking, formatting, exporting, modeling, testing compliance and adjusting data. In this paper, it is assumed that stages up to data exporting are already implemented since an efficient simulation well information environment is available in place. On the other hand, other stages of well completion modeling are discussed in this paper with focus on having valid completion data for reservoir simulation. Data sources and simulation applications have different data formats and standards. Therefore, there must be an accurate translator that adjusts well completion data and adapts it for the reservoir simulation processing applications. This paper presents a well completion data adjustment workflow that empowers reservoir simulators with significant utilization of well completion data resulting in accurate reservoir simulation results. In addition, examples of a case study are presented in this paper as an application of this workflow.

Introduction

Wells in reservoir models are the main asset which control accuracy of predicting and matching field production/injection. Therefore, modeling the wells is essential for accurate reservoir simulation. Various well information is captured in a simulation model (e.g., well location, production and injection; and well completion events including perforation, plugging, squeeze and well tests). The well information varies for each well and changes with time. For example, a well could be producing during a certain period of time and then gets shut-in in a later stage. Each well goes over different stages of completion or workovers throughout the reservoir life-time. For example, a well might have a simple initial completion and then a more complex completion later in its life-time because of the need for reconfiguration due to oil depletion or water cut increase. Therefore, well completion data has a major influence on reservoir forecasts, which the reservoir simulators are meant for. This means that the accuracy of well completions affects the precision of any reservoir simulation case significantly.

Background

The reservoir simulation model is constructed using simulation pre-processing tools and applications. All required information is loaded into these applications to construct the reservoir model for a simulation run. This information covers various types of data, which is retrieved from different data sources.