PRESSURE AND PRESSURE DERIVATIVE ANALYSIS FOR VERTICAL GAS AND OIL WELLS IN STRESS SENSITIVE HOMOGENEOUS AND NATURALLY FRACTURED FORMATIONS WITHOUT TYPE-CURVE MATCHING

Abstract

Currently, rock mechanics plays an important role in the oil industry. Effects of reservoir subsidence, compaction and dilation are being taken into account in modern reservoir management of complex systems. On the other hand, pressure well tests run in stress sensitive formations ought to be interpreted with non conventional techniques.  During the last three decades, several studies relating transient pressure analysis for characterization of stress sensitive reservoirs have been introduced in the literature. Some of them deal with type curves and/or automated history matching. However, due to the nature of the problem, it does not exist a definitive study focused on the adequate characterization of reservoirs which permeability changes as fluid withdrawal advances.  In this paper, the permeability modulus concept introduced by Pedrosa (1986) is taken as the starting basis. A great number of type curves were generated to study the behavior of the above mentioned formations under stress influence. It was found that permeability modulus, therefore permeability changes, can be correlated with the slope of the pressure derivative trend during the radial flow regime when the reservoir suffers compaction. It is also worth to mention that the time at which the minimum characteristic point of a naturally fractured formation (or the inflection point of a semilog plot) found on the pressure derivative plot is practically the same for formations without stress influence. This contributes to the extension of the TDS technique, Tiab (1993), so a new methodology to characterize this kind of reservoirs is proposed here. This was verified by the solution of synthetic problems.