scholarly journals The Impact of Relative Permeability on Horizontal Well Type Curve Analysis in Coalbed Methane Reservoirs

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Remington Clark
2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (01) ◽  
pp. 60-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.R.. R. Clarkson ◽  
R.M.. M. Bustin

Summary Coalbed methane (CBM) produced from subsurface coal deposits has been produced commercially for more than 30 years in North America, and relatively recently in Australia, China, and India. Historical challenges to predicting CBM-well performance and long-term production have included accurate estimation of gas in place (including quantification of in-situ sorbed gas storage); estimation of initial fluid saturations (in saturated reservoirs) and mobile water in place; estimation of the degree of undersaturation (undersaturated coals produce mainly water above desorption pressure); estimation of initial absolute permeability (system); selection of appropriate relative permeability curves; estimation of absolute-permeability changes as a function of depletion; prediction of produced-gas composition changes as a function of depletion; accounting for multilayer behavior; and accurate prediction of cavity or hydraulic-fracture properties. These challenges have primarily been a result of the unique reservoir properties of CBM. Much progress has been made in the past decade to evaluate fundamental properties of coal reservoirs, but obtaining accurate estimates of some basic reservoir and geomechanical properties remains challenging. The purpose of the current work is to review the state of the art in field-based techniques for CBM reservoir-property and stimulation-efficiency evaluation. Advances in production and pressure-transient analysis, gas-content determination, and material-balance methods made in the past 2 decades will be summarized. The impact of these new methods on the evaluation of key reservoir properties, such as absolute/relative permeability and gas content/gas in place, as well as completion/stimulation properties will be discussed. Recommendations on key surveillance data to assist with field-based evaluation of CBM, along with insight into practical usage of these data, will be provided.


1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (06) ◽  
pp. 489-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tommy Warren ◽  
Jim Powers ◽  
David Bode ◽  
Eric Carre ◽  
Lee Smith

This paper (SPE 52993) was revised for publication from paper SPE 36536, first presented at the 1996 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, Denver, 6-9 October. Original manuscript received for review 11 October 1996. Revised manuscript received 22 September 1998. Paper peer approved 23 September 1998. Summary A Wireline retrievable coring system for use with conventional drilling equipment is described. The coring system was developed and tested for application in evaluating coalbed methane prospects where a large quantity of core is required, and it is essential that the core is processed soon after it is cut. A drill plug allows for alternation between coring and drilling without tripping the drillstring. The system is particularly advantageous for coring long intervals, multiple zones relatively close together, or when the exact target depth is unknown. The system has been used to core more than 4940 m (15,057 ft) in Poland, Germany, and France, with a combined core recovery of 94%. In addition, the impact of varying rig costs on total savings is factored into the overall economic evaluation of the system. P. 489


1989 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.A. Blasingame ◽  
J.L. Johnston ◽  
W.J. Lee

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 626
Author(s):  
Jiyuan Zhang ◽  
Bin Zhang ◽  
Shiqian Xu ◽  
Qihong Feng ◽  
Xianmin Zhang ◽  
...  

The relative permeability of coal to gas and water exerts a profound influence on fluid transport in coal seams in both primary and enhanced coalbed methane (ECBM) recovery processes where multiphase flow occurs. Unsteady-state core-flooding tests interpreted by the Johnson–Bossler–Naumann (JBN) method are commonly used to obtain the relative permeability of coal. However, the JBN method fails to capture multiple gas–water–coal interaction mechanisms, which inevitably results in inaccurate estimations of relative permeability. This paper proposes an improved assisted history matching framework using the Bayesian adaptive direct search (BADS) algorithm to interpret the relative permeability of coal from unsteady-state flooding test data. The validation results show that the BADS algorithm is significantly faster than previous algorithms in terms of convergence speed. The proposed method can accurately reproduce the true relative permeability curves without a presumption of the endpoint saturations given a small end-effect number of <0.56. As a comparison, the routine JBN method produces abnormal interpretation results (with the estimated connate water saturation ≈33% higher than and the endpoint water/gas relative permeability only ≈0.02 of the true value) under comparable conditions. The proposed framework is a promising computationally effective alternative to the JBN method to accurately derive relative permeability relations for gas–water–coal systems with multiple fluid–rock interaction mechanisms.


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