f Deconvolution and Its Applications to the Interpretation of Pressure Transient Test Data

Deconvolution provides the equivalent constant rate/pressure response of the well/reservoir system affected by variable flow rates/pressures. Although applying deconvolution for well test and production data analysis is an important challenge because deconvolution is an ill-conditioned inverse problem in the presence of noise in pressure/rate measurements, robust deconvolution algorithms have recently been developed in the literature. With the implementation of permanent pressure and flow-rate measurement systems and the use of recently developed deconvolution algorithms, the importance of deconvolution has increased since it is now possible to analyze the well test/production data with respect to larger radius of investigation and obtain more information regarding well/reservoir system. In other words, by using deconvolution more information about the well/reservoir system, regarding reservoir boundaries and oil and gas volumes supported by measured pressure and deconvolved data. Such information is vital for making decisions for apprising the fields and reducing the overall costs of the reservoir appraisal and development programs. In this work, I introduce the new robust methods based on pressure and pressure-derivative data. Then, I demonstrate the use of these methods with the interpretation of synthetic and real field pressure transient tests, and finally present some guidelines for the effective use of these deconvolution methods in interpretation of pressure transient tests.