DETERMINATION OF WELL-DRAINAGE AREA FOR POWER-LAW FLUIDS BY TRANSIENT PRESSURE ANALYSIS

Since conventional oil is almost depleted, oil companies are focusing their efforts on exploiting heavy oil reserves. A modern and practical technique using the pressure and pressure derivative, log-log plot for estimating the well-drainage area in closed and constant-pressure reservoirs, drained by a vertical well is presented by considering a non-Newtonian flow model for describing the fluid behavior. Several synthetic examples were presented for demonstration and verification purposes. Such fluids as heavy oil, fracturing fluids, some fluids used for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) and drilling muds can behave as either Power-law or Bingham, usually referred to as the non-Newtonian fluids. Currently, there is no way to estimate the well-drainage area from conventional well test analysis when a non-Newtonian fluid is dealt with; therefore, none of the commercial well test interpretation package can estimate this parameter (drainage area).