TABLE OF CONTENTS Good production engineers never stop looking for opportunities to improve the performance of their production systems. Performance enhancement ideas are from careful examinations and thorough analyses of production data to find the controlling factors affecting the performance. Part IV of this book presents procedures taken in the petroleum industry for identifying well problems and means of solving the problems. Materials are presented in the following four chapters.
The engineering work for sustaining and enhancing oil and gas production rates starts from identifying problems that cause low production rates of wells, quick decline of the desirable production fluid, or rapid increase in the undesirable fluids. For oil wells, these problems include
Low productivity
Excessive gas production
Excessive water production
Sand production
For gas wells, the problems include
Low productivity
Excessive water production
Liquid loading
Sand production
Although sand production is easy to identify, well testing and production logging are frequently needed to identify the causes of other well problems.
The lower than expected productivity of oil or gas well is found on the basis of comparison of the well's actual production rate and the production rate that is predicted by Nodal analysis. If the reservoir inflow model used in the Nodal analysis is correct (which is often questionable), the lower than expected well productivity can be attributed to one or more of the following reasons:
Overestimate of...
