(46) A SIMULATION STUDY ON COMPARISON BETWEEN ANALYTICAL AND NUMERICAL SOLUTIONS FOR HORIZONTAL WELL PRODUCTIVITY INDEX

Because the flow regimes and drainage geometry of horizontal well are different from those of vertical wells, there is a need to develop a distinct analytical Productivity Index (PI) solution for horizontal well.  There have been several researches in the early 1990's  developing the solutions; however, each solution generates different PI values.  The degree of disparity depends on how conservative or optimistic the input values are, which possibly results in the reduction in confidence level when applying these analytical methods.  This paper presents a review on the available analytical solutions for horizontal well PI.  In addition, this paper attempts to conduct a comparative study between the analytical solutions an numerical simulation approach to investigate which analytical solution is the most useful and should be utilized with higher confidence level, assuming that the numerical simulation generates more accurate PI values.