Pressure Detrending in Harmonic Pulse Test Interpretation: When, Why and How

Dario Viberti, Eloisa Salina Borello and Francesca Verga
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Dario Viberti: Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering (DIATI), Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Turin, Italy
Eloisa Salina Borello: Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering (DIATI), Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Turin, Italy
Francesca Verga: Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering (DIATI), Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Turin, Italy

Energies, 2018, vol. 11, issue 6, 1-14

Abstract: In reservoir engineering, one of the main sources of information for the characterization of reservoir and well parameters is well testing. An alternative to the standard drawdown/buildup test is Harmonic Pulse Testing (HPT) because it can provide well performance and reservoir behavior monitoring without having to interrupt field production, which is appealing from an economic standpoint. Recorded pressure analysis is performed in the frequency domain by adopting a derivative approach similar to conventional well testing. To this end, pressure and rate data must be decomposed into harmonic components. Test interpretability can be significantly improved if pressure data are detrended prior to interpretation, filtering out non periodic events such as discontinuous production from neighboring wells and flow regime variations that did not respect the designed test periodicity. Therefore, detrending offers the possibility of overcoming the limitation of HPT applicability due to the difficulty of imposing a regularly pulsing rate for the whole test duration (typically lasting several days). This makes HPT attractive for well performance monitoring, especially in gas reservoirs converted to underground gas storage. In this paper, different detrending methodologies are discussed and applied to synthetic and real data. Results show that, if a proper detrending strategy is adopted, information provided by HPT interpretation can be maximized and/or improved.

Keywords: well testing; detrending; harmonic pulse testing; well performance monitoring; underground gas storage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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