Society of Petroleum Engineers

SPE 30217
Well Test Analysis by Reservoir Simulation Coupled with
a History Matching Program
R. Randy Hwan, Texaco Inc.
SPEMember
Copyright 1995, Society of Petroleum Engineers, Inc.
This paper was prepared for presentation at the Petroleum Computer Conference held In Houston, TX, U.S.A" 11-14 June 1995.
This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE Program Committee following review of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s), Contents of the paper, as presented,
have not been reviewed by the Society of Petroleum Engineers and are subjected to correction by the author(s), The material, as presented, does not necessarily reflect any position of the
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A procedure of well test analysis using a
reservoir simulation model coupled with a
history matching program has been
developed, The history matching program
used in this study is called "Adaptive History
Matching (ARM) System" which was
developed by Scientific-Software Intercomp
(SSI) with the participation of Texaco and
two other major oil companies. ARM was
designed to help the engineer deal with the
problems of history matching reservoir
performance data with a reservoir simulator.
Pressure data measured in well test is
directly history matched with the current
method without converting to dimensionless
terms or taking the logarithm of the data.
The history matching system used in the
current procedure is based on Bayesian
inference. Bayes' theorem provides a
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process of learning from experience and
shows how knowledge about the state of
nature can continually be modified as new
data becomes available. Four cases of well
test analysis are presented in this paper.
They include a single well test, an
interference well test, a multi-layered
reservoir case, and a horizontal well test. In
each case, the conventional well test results
are included for comparison with those of
the current method. It only requires a few
simulation runs for the current procedure to
obtain the well test results.
The interference case shows that the
pressure data of the observation well during
injection and shut-in periods at an active well
are matched by the current method. The
analyses by conventional methods can only
be conducted during either the build-up or
the shut-in period. In the multi-layered case,
with crossflow at the wellbore between the
high and low permeability layers; the current
method is capable of determining the
permeabilities of these layers individually. In
contrast; the conventional well test analysis
only provides a composite permeability value
for a multi-layered reservoir. The current
procedure is also applied to the horizontal
well test analysis. The horizontal and
vertical permeabilities are analyzed
simultaneously.
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Coupling a reservoir simulator and a history
matching program proves to be a powerful
tool for well test analysis. The new
procedure provides fast, straightforward
results of reservoir parameters, such as
permeability, skin factor, porosity, etc.
Furthermore, since the new procedure is
based on reservoir simulation, the analysis is
applicable to complicated reservoirs and
non-ideal well tests.