Reserve Estimation from Early Time Production Data in Geopressured Gas Reservoir: Gas Production of Cumulative Unit Pressure Drop Method

Abstract

There is high uncertainty in reserve estimation during the early development of deep ultrahigh pressure gas reservoirs, largely because it remains challenging in accurately determining the formation compressibility. To overcome this, starting from the definition of compressibility, a novel gas production of cumulative unit pressure drop analysis method was established, of which the effectiveness was proven by applications in calculating the reserves of three gas reservoirs. It has been found that, in the limiting case, i.e., when the formation pressure dropped to the normal atmospheric pressure, the dimensionless gas production of the cumulative unit pressure drop was the reciprocal of the initial formation pressure. Besides, the relationship curve of the dimensionless gas production of the cumulative unit pressure drop and pressure drop was a straight line in the medium term, extending the straight line and intersecting the vertical line passing through the original formation pressure point, and the reserves can be determined according to the intersection point and the initial formation pressure. However, due to the influence of natural gas properties, the value needs further correction, and the correction coefficient depends on the pseudocritical temperature of natural gas. Specifically, when the pseudocritical temperature is given, the correction coefficient would be close to the minimum value of the natural gas deviation factor. When the pseudocritical temperature is more than 1.9 and less than 3.0, the minimum deviation factor would be between 0.90 and 1.0, and the higher the pseudocritical temperature, the closer the ratio is to 1.0.