Stimulation and Reservoir Engineering Aspects of Horizontal Wells

摘要: Over the past several years, horizontal wells have become the “hot” topic of the oil industry. The review papers by Joshi11 in mid-1987 and Norris, et al. 95 in early 1991 sparked the interest of major oil companies and small independents alike. By the early 1990s, it seemed that every operator had a horizontal well project planned or online in some area of the world. Because of the interest, economics, and publicity surrounding horizontal wells and the presence of significant gaps in horizontal well technology, a large amount of recent research has been focused on the topic, much of it in the area of reservoir engineering.Recent work in the area of analytical solutions for productivity and transient pressure response has emphasized various boundary conditions. These boundaries are not just the lateral reservoir boundaries as with vertical wells, but the top and bottom (vertical) boundaries encountered in the three-dimensional nature of flow to a horizontal well. Near wellbore effects, such as formation damage, non-Darcy flow, and arbitrary completion have been recently addressed. Some attention has also been given to predicting inflow performance relationships (IPRs) for horizontal wells.