The Improvement of Production Profile While Managing Reservoir Uncertainties with Inflow Control Devices Completions

Abstract The distributions of various parameters such as of the petro-physical properties, fluid contacts, relative permeabilities, aquifer strength etc. influence oil production profile. This requires implementing probabilistic approaches important for the field's performance prediction. Advanced Well Completions (AWCs) are capable to reactively and/or proactively mitigate the unpredictable production conditions of hydrocarbon reservoirs particularly in case of the heterogeneous reservoirs. However, determining the optimum design of the devices is still a big challenge since it should have been done respecting the long-term performance of the completion. This requires using reservoir models that include significant level of uncertainty due to ambiguity of the reservoir and geological parameters used. Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) approach was applied to evaluate various dynamic uncertain parameters with different distributions profiles. Numerous realisations of the reservoir models were also generated to provide a confident level of geological uncertainty by a sequential Gaussian simulation algorithm. Various completions such as Open-hole, Inflow Control Devices (ICDs) and Autonomous Inflow Control Devices (AICDs) were deployed in horizontal wells to investigate the uncertainty management by the well completions. The results showed AICDs completions are more appropriate to reduce the production of the unwanted fluids and increase oil recovery than ICDs. Moreover, overall as well as the individual impacts of the uncertain parameters on oil production profile were evaluated by statistical analysis. This helps determining the most influencing parameters on the production profile as well as the most influenced uncertain parameters when AWCs are deployed. The results showed that although both of the AICDs and ICDs completions significantly reduce the oil production variations comparing with Open-hole completion, AICDs completions perform much better than the ICDs to manage the effects of the reservoir uncertainties on oil recovery. The study aims at providing approaches quantifying the impacts of AWCs on the reservoir uncertainties and confirming the long-term benefits of AWCs while reducing the risk associated with the field's development plan.