New empirical correlation for oil flowrate prediction through chokes

Accurate prediction of choke restricted multiphase flowrate is always interesting in oil industry in the absence of flowmeters for field production monitoring and management purposes. Also, in a producing well, choke is installed for controlling the production rate. In this research, new correlation is developed for predicting the multiphase flowrate through choke specified for one of the Iranian southern oilfields. For this purpose, 166 sets of flowrate measurement data, was gathered and filtered to 142 data sets, at the quality control step. This data was regressed to a linearized modified correlation between the measured flowrate, the wellhead pressure choke size and the producing gas liquid ratio to find the best set of correlation parameters. The resulted correlation was evaluated by determining its average relative error and root mean square error by the excluded set of test data. The evaluation indicated that new correlation could significantly improve the accuracy of flowrate predictions in contrast to previous prominent correlations.