Well Performance Modeling in Unconventional Oil and Gas Wells

The challenge facing reservoir and production engineers remains ensuring continued production from a well, including additional recovery with artificial lift methods. To accomplish this, means to determine the production performance of a well until the end of its life is desired. This challenge is even greater when dealing with production from unconventional formations. This paper presents a methodology to model the production performance of a well producing from an unconventional oil or gas formation. Emphasis is placed on the use of readily-available information to production engineers for the day-to-day analysis and optimization of production from the field. For developing the model, traditional flow regimes observed during the production of a well are utilized. Using this information as well as superposition principle, a working model is developed, tested and validated. Technical contributions of this paper include a procedure to implement this solution in any producing oil or gas well from an unconventional formation, and an Inflow Performance Relationship (IPR) framework for visualizing productivity changes with time of a particular well.