Production-Data Analysis of Gas Reservoirs With Apparent-Permeability and Sorbed-Phase Effects: A Density-Based Approach
Summary Accounting for depletion-dependent permeability and sorbed-phase effects is an important step toward achieving reliable analysis of production performance in unconventional gas systems. This study demonstrates how to account for pressure-dependent apparent-permeability (e.g., gas-slippage) and desorption effects in gas-production analysis of boundary-dominated data with a density-based approach. In this work, apparent-permeability and desorption models are incorporated into the original density-based approach by modifying the definitions of depletion-driven variables that are the basis of the density-based type of analysis. The proposed modification of the original approach successfully enables associated analysis techniques to be applicable to natural-gas reservoirs with gas slippage and adsorbed gas. Results indicate that by modifying the definitions of the depletion-driven variables, the density approach can effectively and successfully capture the effects from gas slippage and desorption. Through a number of case studies, we show that gas-flow rate can be successfully predicted by rescaling liquid solution with the modified density-based variables. As an illustration, we show that resource calculations able to fully take into account these effects are possible when long-term production data are available. This work details the methodology required to do so, and illustrates its application to production-data prediction analysis for unconventional assets.