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Harmonic Testing for Continuous Well and Reservoir Monitoring

2002; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2118/77692-ms

Florian Hollaender, Paul S. Hammond, A. C. Gringarten,

Drilling and Well Engineering

Abstract Harmonic testing for obtaining dynamic reservoir information was first proposed some thirty years ago. Although not much used in the oil industry, interest in the method is revived periodically, mostly for the determination of skin effect and near-wellbore permeability. This paper looks at the practical aspects of using periodic rate variations for testing oil wells. It is shown that such tests can provide the same information as conventional well tests and can be interpreted in the same way. Their main advantage is that they do not require fluids to be brought to surface in exploration or early appraisal testing, or wells to be shut-in in production testing. They also provide data that are less affected by measurement errors and wellbore effects such as multiphase flow or phase redistribution. The main limitation is that, for the same radius of investigation, harmonic tests are significantly longer than conventional tests. Consequently, they cannot be used for reservoir characterization in exploration and appraisal wells. They appear well suited, however, for monitoring reservoir changes from production wells.