Automated Well Injection-Rate Control Based on On-the-fly Interpretation of Pressure Data

On-the-fly well testing and control is a new possibility for production engineers, made available following wide installation of permanent gauges in new wells. Automated interpretation of well measurements and real-time follow-up of well performance changes become a feasible option with recent developments combining data-driven physics-informed methods. In this paper, on-the-fly well testing and control are explored based on new methods for detection of induced fracture opening during Step-Rate Tests (SRT) combined with a rate-advisor approach preventing the opening. It was shown that interpreting SRT data with time-lapse pressure-transient analysis (PTA) can reveal incipient fracture opening before injectivity losses become visible on conventional p-Q plots. We extend this capability into rate advisor that (i) builds no-fracture Safe Operating Envelope (SOE) using the Bourdet derivative, (ii) detects envelope violations within subsequent rate steps, and (iii) automatically reduces the rate to the previous safe level. The rate advisor requires only bottom-hole pressure and rate as input to advise rate changes. The entire loop, including the PTA, decision logic, and rate update, is implemented in Python. Finally, we test the rate advisor in a simulated live-data-channel environment, where synthetic well responses are coupled with the rate advisor within a commercial automated well monitoring workflow.