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Horizontal Wells and Friction

Horizontal wells can experience significant pressure drops due to friction along the wellbore, especially for long horizontal sections. The friction results in an additional pressure drop calculated based on well diameter and casing roughness. When modeling friction, the segmented density calculations must be used and keywords like WFRICTN can be added to specify friction data for horizontal or multi-lateral wells. This accounts for frictional pressure losses over the horizontal section and branches in the well model.

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Maisam Abbas
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28 views4 pages

Horizontal Wells and Friction

Horizontal wells can experience significant pressure drops due to friction along the wellbore, especially for long horizontal sections. The friction results in an additional pressure drop calculated based on well diameter and casing roughness. When modeling friction, the segmented density calculations must be used and keywords like WFRICTN can be added to specify friction data for horizontal or multi-lateral wells. This accounts for frictional pressure losses over the horizontal section and branches in the well model.

Uploaded by

Maisam Abbas
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Horizontal wells and friction:

So far, we haven’t mentioned the effect of friction between well casing and flowing fluids.
Vertical or moderately deviated wells are so short that the friction doesn’t matter, but in long
horizontal wells it may have a significant impact on the well flow. The friction results in an
additional pressure drop along the well, which is calculated based on the well diameter and the
roughness of the casing. The length of the well is always measured from the bottomhole
reference point, which for a horizontal well was the heel.
Note: When a well is defined as a friction well, item 12 in the WELSPECS keyword must be set
to ‘SEG’ (the segmented density calculations must be used).
The keyword for defining friction data is WFRICTN. This keyword can be used for wells on the
standard grid, and for wells on a single LGR.
The keyword is divided into two parts, the first part for the well as such, the second part for
data along the well. Each record is terminated with a slash, an empty record terminates the
keyword.
From manual:

From ressimpdf:
Another keyword used in conjunction with WFRICTN is FRICTION in RUNSPEC section, with
syntax as:

In data file, you first go to RUNSPEC and add FRICTION keyword there:
Then go to WELSPECS and check SEG.

Go to SUMMARY and add keywords FOE (field oil efficiency), FLPR (field liquid
production rate) and WBHP.
In COMPDAT, make the well-length fill the all grids completely in X-direction (i.e. from
I=1 to 10).

Go to WCONPROD, put a slash /, and add keyword WFRICTN, read its syntax for more info.
Run and check output in office.
This keyword is used to designate a well to be a friction well, for which the frictional pressure
losses between the connections and the well’s bottom hole reference point are calculated and
included in the connection head terms. This facility is primarily intended for use with horizontal
and multi-lateral wells, in which frictional pressure losses may be significant over the horizontal
section of the wellbore and in the branches.
This keyword can only be used on one well at a time, so the keyword must be specified more
than once if there is more than one friction well. If the keyword is repeated for a particular well
(for example, to add a new branch or new connections), the data for the entire well must be
supplied each time the keyword is used.

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