Tight Gas Production Performance Using Decline Curves

Abstract

Traditional ("Arps") decline analysis is the most common reservoir engineering tool used for production performance forecasting. It has several advantages over other techniques in that it is simple to use, requires minimal data and is well understood by the industry. Currently, however, these methods are being misused in unconventional applications, such as tight gas. Production perfomance from tight gas reservoirs is characterized by steep initial decline rates and long periods of transient flow. If decline analysis is performed using this transient production data, the main assumption of boundary dominated flow (BDF) is violated and inaccurate forecasts may result. The goal of this work is to understand the behaviour of tight gas reservoirs during transient flow so that the familiar Arps method may be applied. The effects of different tight gas production responses (bilinear, linear, pseudo-radial, boundary dominated) are investigated. Finally, a methodology for applying traditional decline curve analysis to tight gas, with reference to long term transient flow, is presented.