Coorelations for cresting behavior in horizontal wells. Quarterly report, October 1, 1996--December 31, 1996

The following activities have been carried out in the last three months. (1) The fourth review meeting of the Horizontal Well Industrial Affiliates Program was held on October 10-11 at Stanford. The meeting was well attended and well received. In addition to the project presentations, a number of member presentations were also made at the meeting. (2) Draft plans for the continuation of the two-phase flow experiments were drawn up and sent to Marathon and other members for their review and comments. Series of new experiments with and without the wire wrapped screens used in 1996 are being considered for 1997. (3) Work on the application of horizontal wells for producing gas condensate reservoirs was continued. After verification of the black oil formulation, emphasis is being put on the compositional case where simulation runs have been set up to check the results against a semi-analytical solution. (4) The previous work on the effects of heterogeneities on horizontal well performance was continued and a paper on the subject was completed. Future work in this area will deal with a careful analysis of the interaction of heterogeneity and production performance. (5) Research work on developing coarse grid methods to study cresting in horizontal wells was continued. The previous correlations for optimum grid size, breakthrough time, and post breakthrough behavior (i.e., water-oil ratio) were further tested and optimized. Procedures to derive pseudo-functions either using numerical correlations or coarse grid simulations have been proposed and successfully tested