Impermeable Barrier Detection in an Oil Field Using Interference Testing Data from Two Wells Near a Fault. Part 1. Verification of the Proposed Methodology

Abstract

we studied the possibility of detecting an impermeable barrier in an oil field using two-well interference test data. The wells are located on one side of the barrier. In reservoir engineering, an impermeable barrier denotes a hydraulic no-flow boundary that restricts fluid communication in the reservoir. The relevance of this study stems from the fact that the presence of faults significantly affects oil field development efficiency. We studied why one-well test data are insufficient for impermeable boundary detection, as shown in a series of seven studies published by the authors in 2023–2025. This limitation arises from errors in the estimation of formation parameters determined by non-hydrodynamic methods. We showed that the number of such parameters can be reduced using the proposed approach. We performed two-dimensional numerical hydrodynamic simulations of well interference tests for a homogeneous infinite reservoir and for the same reservoir containing an impermeable boundary. We proposed an algorithm for impermeable boundary detection based on interference response analysis. We evaluated the influence of errors in non-hydrodynamic formation parameter measurements on the validity of boundary detection. We showed that the proposed approach enables reliable detection of an impermeable barrier, even in the presence of parameter estimation errors, in contrast to the one-well case. Further comprehensive investigation is planned to assess the practical applicability of the method.