A new streamline model for near-well flow validated with radial flow experiments

Streamline simulation is a powerful tool that can be used for full field forecasting, history matching, flood optimization, and displacement visualization. This paper presents the development and the application of a new semi-analytical streamline simulation method in the near-wellbore region in polar/cylindrical coordinate systems. The main objective of this paper is to study the effects of the permeability heterogeneity and well completion details in the near-wellbore region. These effects dictate the streamline geometries, which in turn influence well productivity. Previous streamline applications used a constant flow rate for each stream tube. In this paper, streamline simulation is performed under the assumption of constant pressure boundaries, which is a novel and non-trivial extension of streamline simulation. Solutions are constructed by treating each stream tube as a flow unit by invoking analytical solutions for such geometries. In addition, visualization experiments are conducted to investigate the effect of the heterogeneity. Two-dimensional waterflooding visualization experiments in radial porous media are performed with constant pressure boundaries. The streamline simulator is applied to history match the relative permeabilities using these experiments, thereby validating the new near-well streamline method.