Piers Johnson from OPC played a key role at the 2017 SPE Well testing workshop in Dubai. The workshop, Well Testing – Technology, Operations, Sampling, and Reservoir Characterisation in the Current Price Environment, is the leading event for well testing in the SPE annual calendar. Piers presented on two distinct topics:
- Unusual Derivative Responses from Layered and Water Edge Drive Reservoirs
- A Common Framework for Analysis of Well Test and Surveillance Pressure and Rate Data
The second presentation was based on the work of Mike Levitan, OPC Consultant, and explains how deconvolution can be applied to unconventional reservoirs as well as conventional reservoirs. In unconventional reservoirs the reservoir volume investigated by a typical well test is confined to immediate vicinity of the well (as little as a few feet). For this reason traditional well testing does not allow reliable assessment of the well long-term production capacity and is not a practical and proper approach for unconventional reservoir/well evaluation. Mike’s framework involves an analysis technique based on pressure-rate deconvolution that is applicable for both well test and surveillance data. This approach does not rely on any automatic pressure-rate deconvolution algorithms which are often too restrictive and not robust enough for surveillance data acquired in the course of routine production operations.
Piers said “I was delighted to have been invited to present at the workshop and to have the opportunity to share Mike Levitan’s new framework. I am particularly excited by this new framework as it can significantly increase the accuracy of the reservoir description, and therefore production forecasting in unconventional reservoirs and can deliver results far quicker than traditional models.”
“Attendees at the workshop were very interested in the new framework. Mike will be publishing a full technical paper in the next few months but I would encourage anyone interested in the topic to contact me quickly as we are already scheduling projects into the summer of 2017.”
Contact Piers on +44 20 7428 1111 or by email .