Patent Grant
11808138
This disclosure relates to using neutron generator based measurements to determine environmental properties, such as gas pressure, of a formation surrounding a cased wellbore.
This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art that may be related to various aspects of the present techniques, which are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present disclosure. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as an admission of any kind.
Producing hydrocarbons from a wellbore drilled into a geological formation is a relatively complex endeavor. In many cases, decisions involved in hydrocarbon exploration and production may be informed by measurements from downhole tools that are conveyed deep into the wellbore. The measurements may be used to infer properties and characteristics of the geological formation surrounding the wellbore. The discovery and observation of resources using downhole techniques generally takes place down in the wellbore via one or more downhole tools. These tools may be a part of a tool-string lowered into an open or cased wellbore.
In some instances, a downhole tool may make direct gas pressure measurements by utilizing one or more gas pressure sensors at a location of interest within the wellbore. However, in some instances, a wellbore casing may reduce the efficacy of such sensors, without, for example, time and resource consuming perforations in the casing at the location of interest. As such, it may be advantageous to have an accurate way of determining the gas pressure at the location of interest without perforating the casing.
A summary of certain embodiments disclosed herein is set forth below. It should be understood that these aspects are presented merely to provide the reader with a brief summary of these certain embodiments and that these aspects are not intended to limit the scope of this disclosure. Indeed, this disclosure may encompass a variety of aspects that may not be set forth below.
Production of a geological formation may be directly affected by the gas pressure in the formation at the location of extraction within a wellbore. For example, a higher gas pressure may result in higher rates of production of the natural resources within the formation. In general, gas pressure measurements are usually obtained in an open wellbore environment and/or, if the wellbore is cased, at locations of perforations in the casing. However, once the wellbore is cased, it may become difficult to obtain direct gas pressure measurements of the formation at different locations within the wellbore. For example, it may be desired to take gas pressure measurements at multiple locations in the wellbore without perforating the casing at each location.
Estimating the gas pressure within the formation without perforating the casing may, for example, provide much needed information about future production, increase production efficiency, and/or reduce expenditures, both time and resources. To obtain such an estimate, in one embodiment, a downhole tool utilizing a PNG may be placed at a location within a wellbore to obtain one or more independent measurements such neutron porosity, a neutron capture cross-section (sigma), and a fast-neutron cross-section (FNXS). Each of the measurements may be used, along with assumed properties of the formation, to obtain an estimate of the gas pressure at the location the measurements were obtained. Furthermore, the estimate from each of the independent measurements may be compared for congruency. If the estimates agree with each other, the confidence in the estimate may be increased, and if the estimates do not agree, one or more of the assumptions may be altered and the estimates recomputed. The estimated gas pressure may be used to determine if production at a specific location within the formation should be accomplished and/or to determine the most effective location within the wellbore to initiate production.
Various refinements of the features noted above may be undertaken in relation to various aspects of the present disclosure. Further features may also be incorporated in these various aspects as well. These refinements and additional features may exist individually or in any combination. For instance, various features discussed below in relation to one or more of the illustrated embodiments may be incorporated into any of the above-described aspects of the present disclosure, alone or in any combination. The brief summary presented above is intended to familiarize the reader with certain aspects and contexts of embodiments of the present disclosure without limitation to the claimed subject matter.
Various aspects of this disclosure may be better understood upon reading the following detailed description and upon reference to the drawings in which:
One or more specific embodiments of the present disclosure will be described below. These described embodiments are examples of the presently disclosed techniques. Additionally, in an effort to provide a concise description of these embodiments, the features of an actual implementation may not be described in the specification. It should be appreciated that in the development of any such actual implementation, as in any engineering or design project, numerous implementation-specific decisions may be made to achieve the developers' specific goals, such as compliance with system-related and business-related constraints, which may vary from one implementation to another. Moreover, it should be appreciated that such a development effort might be complex and time consuming, but would be a routine undertaking of design, fabrication, and manufacture for those of ordinary skill having the benefit of this disclosure.
When introducing elements of various embodiments of the present disclosure, the articles “a,” “an,” and “the” are intended to mean that there are one or more of the elements. The terms “comprising,” “including,” and “having” are intended to be inclusive and mean that there may be additional elements other than the listed elements. Additionally, it should be understood that references to “one embodiment” or “an embodiment” of the present disclosure are not intended to be interpreted as excluding the existence of additional embodiments that also incorporate the recited features.
The oil and gas industry includes a number of sub-industries, such as experimentation, exploration, drilling, logging, extraction, transportation, refinement, retail, and so forth. During exploration, and drilling, wellbores may be drilled into the ground for reasons that may include discovery, observation, or extraction of resources. These resources may include oil, gas, water, or any other combination of elements within the ground.
Wellbores, sometimes called boreholes, may be straight or curved holes drilled into the ground from which resources may be discovered, observed, or extracted. During and/or after the establishment of a wellbore, well logging may be practiced. Well logging may include making a detailed record of the geological formations penetrated by a wellbore, and is generally part of the discovery and observation of resources.
The exploration of what lies beneath the ground may be accomplished by a number of methods including surface and downhole techniques. The discovery and observation of resources using downhole techniques generally takes place down in the wellbore. In many implementations, downhole tools may include a nuclear radiation source (e.g., a neutron, x-ray, or gamma ray source) to impart high-energy radiation into the environment (e.g., the wellbore and geological formation). In one embodiment, the radiation source may produce neutrons, for example, via a pulsed neutron generator (PNG). The high energy neutrons may scatter inelastically or elastically off nuclei in the materials surrounding the downhole tool. Some inelastic scattering may result in the emission of gamma rays. Neutrons may slow down through elastic or inelastic scattering and may reach epithermal or thermal energy and eventually be captured by nuclei in the materials surrounding the tool. The neutron capture may result in the emission of gamma rays, the energies of which may vary depending on the type of element that emitted the gamma ray. These gamma-rays may then be detected by one or more detectors. Additionally, the emitted neutrons may bounce back from the environment and be detected by one or more neutron detectors. These gamma-ray and/or neutron detections may then be analyzed to determine characteristics of the environment. Additionally, the delay between neutron emission from the generator and neutron and/or gamma ray detection by the detector may be affected by the properties of the environment, such as density, porosity, and/or lithology. Furthermore, nuclear radiation may pass through a casing of a wellbore allowing for measurements of the formation in a cased wellbore.
Production of the formation may be directly affected by the gas pressure in the formation at the location of extraction within the wellbore. For example, a higher gas pressure may result in higher rates of production of the natural resources within the formation. In general, gas pressure measurements are usually obtained in an open wellbore environment and/or, if the wellbore is cased, at locations of perforations in the casing. However, once the wellbore is cased, it may become difficult to obtain direct gas pressure measurements of the formation at different locations within the wellbore. For example, it may be desired to take gas pressure measurements at multiple locations in the wellbore without perforating the casing at each location. Furthermore, the gas pressure at a particular location in the formation may change over time, for example due to production in another location of the formation and/or wellbore. As such, estimating the gas pressure within the formation without perforating the casing may, for example, provide much needed information about future production, increase production efficiency, and/or reduce expenditures, both time and resources.
In one embodiment, a downhole tool utilizing a PNG may be placed at a location within a wellbore to obtain one or more independent measurements such neutron porosity, a neutron capture cross-section (sigma), and a fast-neutron cross-section (FNXS). Each of the measurements may be used, along with assumed properties of the formation, to obtain an estimate of the gas pressure at the location the measurements were obtained. Furthermore, the estimate from each of the independent measurements may be compared for congruency. If the estimates agree with each other, the confidence in the estimate may be increased, and if the estimates do not agree, one or more of the assumptions may be altered and the estimates recomputed. The estimated gas pressure may be used to determine if production at a specific location within the formation should be accomplished and/or to determine the most effective location within the wellbore to initiate production.
With the foregoing in mind,
Moreover, while the downhole tool 12 is described as a wireline downhole tool, it should be appreciated that any suitable conveyance may be used. For example, the downhole tool 12 may instead be conveyed as a logging-while-drilling (LWD) tool as part of a bottom-hole assembly (BHA) of a drill string, conveyed on a slickline or via coiled tubing, and so forth. For the purposes of this disclosure, the downhole tool 12 may be any suitable downhole tool that uses neutron and or neutron-induced gamma ray measurements within the wellbore 16 (e.g., downhole environment).
The downhole tool 12 may receive energy from an electrical energy device or an electrical energy storage device, such as the auxiliary power source 24 or another electrical energy source to power the tool. Additionally, in some embodiments the downhole tool 12 may include a power source within the downhole tool 12, such as a battery system or a capacitor to store sufficient electrical energy to activate the neutron source and record gamma-ray or neutron radiation.
Control signals 26 may be transmitted from a data processing system 28 to the downhole tool 12, and data signals 26 related to the downhole tool 12 measurements, such as the time spectra, may be returned to the data processing system 28 from the downhole tool 12. The data processing system 28 may be any electronic data processing system that can be used to carry out the systems and methods of this disclosure. For example, the data processing system 28 may include a processor 30, which may execute instructions stored in memory 32 and/or storage 34. As such, the memory 32 and/or the storage 34 of the data processing system 28 may be any suitable article of manufacture that can store the instructions. The memory 32 and/or the storage 34 may be read-only memory (ROM), random-access memory (RAM), flash memory, an optical storage medium, or a hard disk drive, to name a few examples. A display 36, which may be any suitable electronic display, may display images generated by the processor 30. The data processing system 28 may be a local component of the well-logging system 10 (e.g., incorporated with the logging winch system 20, the downhole tool 12, the downhole tool string, the bottom-hole assembly, etc.). Additionally, the data processing system 28 may be a remote device that analyzes data from multiple logging winch systems 20, a device located proximate to the drilling operation, or a combination thereof. In some embodiments, the data processing system 28 may be a mobile computing device (e.g., tablet, smart phone, or laptop) or a server remote from the logging winch system 20. The downhole tool 12 may be used in a wellbore 16 with or without a casing 38, which may include pipe, cement, or other materials.
As discussed above, some measurements, such as gas pressure measurements, at locations within the wellbore 16 may be generally taken in the open wellbore 16 without or before the introduction of the casing 38. However, after the casing 38 has been implemented within the wellbore 16, it may be difficult to obtain certain measurements of the formation 14 (e.g., the gas pressure measurement). Further, in some scenarios, the gas pressures at different locations within the formation 14 may change over time. For example, as depicted in
Perforating the casing 38 to take a direct gas pressure measurement at the second location 46 and/or beginning a workover (e.g., a resource extraction process) may incur significant expenditure of time and/or materials. As such, estimating the gas pressure within the formation 14 without perforating the casing 38 may provide much needed information about future production and reduce expenditures. For example, if the gas pressure at the second location 46 is determined to be below a threshold, it may not be economical to pursue perforations 42 and/or a workover at the second location 46. However, if the gas pressure is determined to be above the threshold and/or is near a previous gas pressure measurement (e.g., an open wellbore measurement), a workover of the formation 14 at the second location 46 may economical.
In determining the gas pressure, measurements may be made in the wellbore 16 using the downhole tool 12 and interpolated to obtain a gas pressure estimate in the formation 14. As depicted in
The radiation source 48 may emit the high-energy neutrons in a pulsing scheme 58, as illustrated in
Additionally, the detectors 50 may be arranged at different distances from the radiation source 48 to further distinguish counts due to different types of interactions within the formation 14. Further, independent measurements such as sigma, a neutron porosity (TPHI), and a fast-neutron cross section (FNXS) may be obtained from, for example, the gamma ray counts. Moreover, each independent measurement may be used separately to determine the gas pressure, as each independent measurement relies on a different subset of the radiation counts detected by the one or more detectors 50. For example, the sigma measurement may be generally related to the decay of count detections after the neutron burst 66, during the off period 68. Moreover, the TPHI measurement may be generally related to a ratio of total counts between detectors 50 at different distances from the radiation source 48 over time 60, and the FNXS may generally relate to the number of radiation counts during the neutron burst 66 at, for example, the far detector 50C.
The independent measurements of sigma, TPHI, and FNXS generally follow linear volumetric mixing laws. That is, in a simplified model, if the formation 14 is composed of a rock matrix, water, and gas, the response equations for each independent measurement may be written as the linear combination of component responses due to each of the rock matrix, the water, and the gas. For example, EQ 1 depicts that the sigma measurement is a linear combination of component responses due to the components of sigma (Σ), such as the sigma of the rock matrix (Σma), the sigma of the water (Σw), and the sigma of the gas (Σgas),
where Sw is the water saturation and ϕ is the total porosity of the formation 14. TPHI and FNXS can be similarly broken down as depicted in EQs. 2 and 3,
where TPHIma is the TPHI of the rock matrix, TPHIw is the TPHI of the water, TPHIgas is the TPHI of the gas, FNXSma is the FNXS of the rock matrix, FNXSw is the FNXS of the water, and FNXSgas is the FNXS of the gas.
In some embodiments, the above equations may be used to solve for, for example, the total porosity and/or water saturation. In such a case, multiple assumptions are made and the component responses are each calculated (e.g., from tables and/or a facilitating computer program). However, one such assumption may include the gas pressure such as the open wellbore gas pressure taken before casing the wellbore 16. As discussed herein, such a gas pressure assumption may be inaccurate, and, in accordance with an embodiment of the present disclosure, be determined by reversing the calculation flow and making assumptions about the formation 14 other than gas pressure. For example, the total porosity may be known or estimated based on open wellbore measurements, and the water saturation may be known or estimated based, for example, on open wellbore measurements and/or capillary pressure data.
The component responses may each depend on the composition of the rock matrix, water, and gas. For example, the rock matrix component responses (e.g., Σma, TPHIma, and FNXSma) and the water component responses (e.g., Σw, TPHIw, and FNXSw) may vary based on the type of rock matrix (e.g., limestone, silica, etc.) and the composition of the water (e.g., salinity, compounds in solution, etc.), respectively, as well as physical properties such as density. The rock matrix component responses and the water component responses may be estimated from tables and/or a facilitating program based on assumed and/or known properties. Such assumptions may stem from open wellbore measurements, cased wellbore measurements (e.g., nuclear spectroscopy measurements), laboratory measurements, surface measurements, measurements in a separate wellbore of the formation 14, and/or any other suitable means of obtaining formation properties. Furthermore, each of the gas component responses (e.g., Σgas, TPHIgas, and FNXSgas) may be written as a function of the gas pressure, as illustrated by EQ. 4,
Xgas=f(Gas Pressure) EQ. 4
where Xgas is a generalized gas component response (e.g., Σgas, TPHIgas, or FNXSgas).
ρg=28.967γgP/zRT EQ. 5
where ρg is the gas density, γg is the specific gravity for the gas, P is the gas pressure, z is the compressibility factor, R is the gas-law constant, and T is the temperature 80. In addition to the equation of state, the chemical composition may be assumed to, for example, provide quantities for the material variables (e.g., the specific gravity and compressibility factor). In some embodiments, the chemical composition and/or the equation of state may be assumed based on pressure, volume, and temperature (PVT) measurements from the open wellbore measurements, or any other suitable process.
A computer program (e.g., SNUPAR, a nuclear parameter code produced by Schlumberger Ltd. or other suitable program) may take as inputs the gas density, pressure, and temperature or other complementary parameters and output the gas component response. In one embodiment, the temperature may be estimated or measured in the wellbore 16 and a range of gas pressures (e.g., from a high pressure as measured in the open wellbore 16 to a low pressure corresponding to depletion) are evaluated. Each gas pressure, along with the temperature, may be substituted into the equation of state, such as EQ. 5, to determine the gas density. The range of gas pressures and corresponding gas densities, along with the temperature, may be input into the computer program to output a range of gas component responses, and an equation may be fitted to the ranges of the gas pressure and the gas component responses. Further, a fitted equation may be generated for each of the gas component responses (e.g., Σgas, TPHIgas, or FNXSgas). The fitted equation represents the relationship between the reservoir gas pressure 76 and the gas component response at a given temperature 80 such as a graph 74 of the plot 72.
The fitted equation corresponding to the assumed properties of the formation 14 for one or more of the gas component responses, Σgas, TPHIgas, and FNXSgas may be substituted into EQs. 1, 2, and 3, respectively, to yield relationships between the independent measurements and the reservoir gas pressure 76, and the relationship may be arranged to solve for the reservoir gas pressure 76 in terms of the independent measurements. In one embodiment, the reservoir gas pressure 76 may be obtained from one or more of the independent measurements. If obtained from multiple of the independent measurements, the reservoir gas pressures 76 may be compared for congruency. If the determined reservoir gas pressures 76 from two or more of the independent measurements are different, one or more of the assumed variables may be incorrect. In one embodiment, the assumed variables may be fitted, within bounds of uncertainty, until the reservoir gas pressures 76 from the multiple independent measurements are approximately equal (e.g., within a statistical range of uncertainty). Moreover, in some embodiments, the reservoir gas pressure 76 and a separate variable (e.g., water saturation) may be solved for simultaneously by using two independent measurements. As will be appreciated, each independent measurement used may increase the number of unknowns that may be determined.
Additionally or alternatively, time-lapsed logging of the wellbore 16 (e.g., at the second location 46 may further decrease the uncertainty in the determined reservoir gas pressure 76. For example, periodic determination of the reservoir gas pressure 76 (e.g., over a time period of production at a different location (e.g., the first location 44) in the formation 14) may eliminate or reduce the input assumptions to the gas pressure relationships discussed above. In one embodiment, if changes in sigma, TPHI, and/or FNXS are noted, the change may be assumed to be due to a change in the gas pressure (e.g., assuming no water encroachment in the area of interest). In such an embodiment, the uncertainty of the rock matrix and water component responses may cancel out, and, thus, a reduction in uncertainty may be obtained.
To help further illustrate,
Further,
Although the above referenced flowcharts 82, 96 are shown in a given order, in certain embodiments, the depicted steps may be reordered, altered, deleted, and/or occur simultaneously. Additionally, the referenced flowcharts 82, 96 are given as illustrative tools, and further decision and/or process blocks may be added depending on implementation.
The specific embodiments described above have been shown by way of example, and it should be understood that these embodiments may be susceptible to various modifications and alternative forms. It should be further understood that the claims are not intended to be limited to the particular forms disclosed, but rather to cover modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of this disclosure.
This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 62/749,978, entitled “GAS PRESSURE MEASUREMENT WITHIN CASED WELLBORE SYSTEMS AND METHODS,” filed Oct. 24, 2018, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated herein by reference.
| Filing Document | Filing Date | Country | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| PCT/US2019/057811 | 10/24/2019 | WO |
| Publishing Document | Publishing Date | Country | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| WO2020/086813 | 4/30/2020 | WO | A |
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| Number | Date | Country | |
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| 20210318461 A1 | Oct 2021 | US |
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| 62749978 | Oct 2018 | US |
