Overcoming the Obstacle of Reservoir Stimulation Through ICD Completion - The First Approach of Valvular Conduit for Inflow and Outflow Control Devices

Abstract

Horizontal wells often require production control along the open hole. This is achieved by installing appropriate Inflow Control Devices (ICD) configurations that introduce higher restrictions across flow dominant zones and less restrictions across poorer quality zones respectively. Although these restrictions are designed to allow normalized production across the entire horizontal section, it can adversely impact the control of injection rates across the horizontal section during acid stimulation jobs. This paper intends to discuss a new approach to overcome these limitations and allow injection of the desired rates resulting in more effective acid stimulation works. To overcome injection rate limitation during stimulation, a new valvular conduit flow profile was tested for ICD application. It relies on dynamic diversions and collisions of the fluid flow in series to provide restrictions, hence pressure drop. The valvular conduit geometries were adjusted to achieve desired flow restrictions that are equivalent to nozzle ICD in production direction. When the flow is reversed, valvular conduit profile ICD significantly reduces fluid diversions and collisions resulting in higher rate in injection direction for the same applied pressure drop. These unique features were taken into ICD near wellbore modelling workflow in conjunction with available well and reservoir properties to evaluate its performance and operating envelope. Furthermore, stimulation model was studied for the new completion impact on fluid distributions as well as acid penetration in to the reservoir matrix.