Michael J. Economides - Petroleum Production Systems

Second Edition

Michael J. Economides
A. Daniel Hill
Christine Ehlig-Economides
Ding Zhu

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Petroleum production systems / Michael J. Economides. 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-13-703158-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Oil fieldsProduction methods. 2. Petroleum engineering.
I. Economides, Michael J.
TN870.E29 2013
622'.338dc23 2012022357

Copyright 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by copyright, and permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission to use material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson Education, Inc., Permissions Department, One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458, or you may fax your request to (201) 236-3290.

ISBN-13: 978-0-13-703158-0
ISBN-10: 0-13-703158-0

Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at Courier in Westford, Masscachusetts.
Second printing, January, 2013

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I have waited on this book for the last 10 years. It is a modernized version of the classic first edition, thousands of copies of which have been distributed to my former trainees, engineers, and associates. The authors of the book have worked with me in a number of capacities for 25 years and we have become kindred spirits both in how we think about oil and gas production enhancement and, especially, in knowing how bad production management can be, even in the most unexpected places and companies.

It is a comprehensive book that describes the production system, or what I refer to as nodal analysis, artificial lift, well diagnosis, matrix stimulation, hydraulic fracturing, and sand control.

There are some important points that are made in this book, which I have made repeatedly in the past:

To increase field production, well improvement can be more effective than infill drilling, especially when the new wells are just as suboptimum as existing wells. We demonstrated this while I was managing Yukos E&P in Russia. During that time appropriate production enhancement actions improved field production by more than 15% even after stopping all drilling for as long as a year.

In conventional reservoirs, optimized well completions do not sacrifice ultimate field recovery as long as they are achieved with adequate reservoir pressure support from either natural gas cap or water drive mechanisms or through injection wells.

Many, if not most, operators fail to address well performance, and few wells are produced at their maximum flow potential. This book takes great steps to show that proper production optimization is far more important to success than just simply executing blindly well completions and even stimulation practices. In particular, I consider the Unified Fracture Design (UFD) approach, the brainchild of the lead author, to be the only coherent approach to hydraulic fracture design. I have been using it exclusively and successfully in all my hydraulic fracture design work.

This book provides not only best practices but also the rationale for new activities. The strategies shown in this book explain why unconventional oil and gas reservoirs are successfully produced today.

The book fills a vacuum in the industry and has come not a moment too soon.

Joe Mach
Inventor, Nodal Analysis
Former Executive VP, Yukos
Former VP, Schlumberger

Since the first edition of this book appeared in 1994, many advances in the practice of petroleum production engineering have occurred. The objective of this book is the same as for the first edition: to provide a comprehensive and relatively advanced textbook in petroleum production engineering, that suffices as a terminal exposure to senior undergraduates or an introduction to graduate students. This book is also intended to be used in industrial training to enable nonpetroleum engineers to understand the essential elements of petroleum production. Numerous technical advances in the years since the first edition have led to the extensive revisions that readers will notice in this second edition. In particular, widespread use of horizontal wells and much broader application of hydraulic fracturing have changed the face of production practices and justified critical updating of the text. The authors have benefited from wide experience in both university and industrial settings. Our areas of interest are complementary and ideally suited for this book, spanning classical production engineering, well testing, production logging, artificial lift, and matrix and hydraulic fracture stimulation. We have been contributors in these areas for many years. Among the four of us, we have taught petroleum production engineering to literally thousands of students and practicing engineers using the first edition of this book, both in university classes and in industry short courses, and this experience has been one of the key guiding factors in the creation of the second edition.

This book offers a structured approach toward the goal defined above. describe the workings of the reservoir and well systems.

Gas lift is outlined in presents the state-of-the-art in modern diagnosis that includes well testing, production logging, and well monitoring with permanent downhole instruments.

From the well diagnosis it can be concluded whether the well is in need of matrix stimulation, hydraulic fracturing, artificial lift, combinations of the above, or none. Matrix stimulation for all major types of reservoirs is presented in is a new chapter dealing with advances in sand management.