New multilateral well architecture in heterogeneous reservoirs

Multilateral well technology has been widely used in the world oil fields. There still has technical limitation of these kinds of well structure. This thesis presents a new multilateral well architecture which is more flexible and economical. The performance of new multilateral well in heterogeneous reservoirs is studied, and that is compared with vertical well architecture also. In order to study the productivity of new multilateral wells, we use a numerical simulation method to set up heterogeneous reservoir models. The three reservoir models included anisotropic permeability, shale multi-layer, and flow units. Under a pseudo-steady-state, the productivities of horizontal laterals and deviated laterals are calculated and compared. We find that new multilateral well architecture has good performance in heterogeneous reservoir. The heterogeneous properties of reservoirs influence the productivity of horizontal laterals more than deviated laterals. The shale multi-layer and flow units that dominate the fluid flow in reservoirs are important for reservoir characterization.