Analysis of Wellbore Pressure Drop on Horizontal Well Performance

The problem of wellbore pressure drop on horizontal well performance has been a concern to many researchers and the petroleum industry. Wellbore pressure losses in horizontal well not only increases gas or water conning tendency at the heel of the wellbore but also chokes oil production at the distant part of the horizontal wellbore thereby rendering some portion of the horizontal well unproductive. This limits the usefulness of increasing the horizontal for incremental oil recovery due to wellbore losses along the horizontal length. Many works on wellbore pressure losses on horizontal well performance are based on Dikkens model and consider only the drain-hole section of the horizontal wellbore and a homogenous reservoir. In this work, a new approach to actual productivity will be proposed to predict the production rate considering all the possible pressure losses in a horizontal well under inflow condition. This actual productivity will be derived by assuming steady-state flow of a slightly compressible single-phase fluid in an anisotropic formation.