A Novel Workflow for Early Time Transient Pressure Data Interpretation in Tight Oil Reservoirs with Physical Constraints

In this work, a novel workflow has been proposed, validated and applied to interpret the early time transient pressure data in tight oil reservoirs with physical constraints. More specifically, the theoretical model was developed to obtain the transient pressure response for a vertical well in tight oil reservoirs with consideration of pseudo threshold pressure gradient (TPG). Then, a physical constraint between the skin factor and formation permeability has been proposed based on the physical meaning of percolation theory. This physical constraint can be applied to determine the lower limit of the skin factor which can reduce the uncertainty during the interpretation process. It is found that the influence range of the skin factor and permeability may partially overlap during the interpretation process without consideration of physical constraints. Additionally, it is found that the equivalent wellbore radius is more reasonable by considering the skin factor constraints. Furthermore, the short-time asymptotic method was applied to separate the small pressure signal at the early time period and a novel type curve was proposed to better analyze the early time pressure response. Subsequently, sensitivity analyses were conducted to investigate the influence of different parameters on the new type curves. It is found that the new type curves are more dispersed and sensitive to the parameters at the early time period which can be beneficial for the early time transient pressure analysis in a tight formation. The proposed method has been validated and then extended to a field application, demonstrating that the transient pressure for a vertical well in a tight formation can be analyzed in a reasonable and accurate manner with only early time transient pressure data.