Analytical, numerical and experimental study of gas coning on horizontal wells

Nowadays, new horizontal wells prone to experience gas cone problem usually have multiple production zones. These wells are equipped with inflow control devices (ICDs) or autonomous inflow control devices (AICDs) to mitigate the production of the undesired fluid. In the proposed study, we use analytical calculation, numerical simulations and experimental results to analyze different production strategies when using long horizontal wells in such reservoirs. By the end, we first identified numerical models to represent the dynamic behavior of a gas–oil interface. By validating them through an analytical solution, we used an active control strategy both to obtain and to analyze the associated flow rate for different positions of the interface in steady state from static equilibrium to the well neighborhood. The findings of this research reaffirm there is no strategy that overcomes the production with critical flow rate in steady state. However, the exact critical flow rate is a theoretical value, being hard to assess in the field. In this way, the main contribution of this study is to indicate for the case in consideration the usual production strategy of using multiple zones equipped with AICDs, since it has a cumulative production extremely close to the theoretical maximum and it represents a well-known technology for field applications.