Transport in Porous Media, Vol.80, No.2, 305-328, 2009
Flow Performance of Perforated Completions
A powerful approximate method for modeling the flow performance of perforated completions under steady-state conditions has been developed. The method is based on the representation of the perforation tunnels surrounding a wellbore by the equivalent elongated ellipsoids. This makes possible an analytical treatment of a 3D problem of steady-state flow in a porous medium with complex multiple production surfaces. The solution is obtained for a vertical wellbore fully penetrating through a horizontal formation in the presence of permeability anisotropy. The perforations are oriented horizontally, arranged in almost arbitrary patterns, repeating along the wellbore, and may have different lengths and shapes. The hydraulic resistances of perforations flowing inside them as well as the crushed zones around them with impaired permeability are neglected. The approximate solution found was verified by comparing the previous analytical/numerical solutions for a small number of perforations. This approach allows one to determine the local skin or the effective wellbore radius for any perforated interval, which can then be integrated into the conventional calculations of well productivity and used for the perforating gun selection during perforation job design.
Keywords:Well productivity;Steady-state flow;Skin;Effective wellbore radius;Productivity index;Perforation;Perforated completion;Modeling