Publications

Water coning is a serious problem in oil production operations. Despite the fact of common occurrences of water production from thin oil reservoir, it actually increases the cost of producing or lifting operations cost and reduces the efficiency of depletion mechanism and overall well recovery. After water breakthroughs the wellbore, the water phase will increase and gradually becomes dominant over oil Coning behavior in horizontal well is still not fully understood. The lack of knowledge of fluids heterogeneity and its distribution within the reservoir have led to either over-prediction or under-prediction on parameters controlling water coning. Muskat and Wyckoff (1935) proposed a simple formulation for water coning in vertical well. Based on Muskat definition, water coning problem could be minimized by doing control on critical production rate. Critical production rate is a maximum production rate, which does not affect cone/crest stability. Researches on water cresting behavior on horizontal well were conducted mathematically (Chaperon, 1986, Hoyland et. al., 1986, Papatzacos, 1991), empirically (Izwardhy, 2011), physically and at laboratory scale as well ( Abbas and Bass, 1988, Aulie et. al., 1993, Wibowo et. al., 2004 ). The objective of this research is to analyze water coning behavior and to test sensitivity of certain parameters that affect critical production rate and optimum supercritical rate in horizontal well within bottom water drive systems. This research uses commercial numerical simulator to analyze the sensitivity for each parameters. The output for this research is to develop a numerical equation to determine critical and optimum rate of horizontal well in bottom water drive reservoir.