Modeling of Inflow Well Performance of Multilateral Wells: Employing the Concept of Well Interference and the Joshi's Expression

The use of multilateral well is becoming an emerging method to improve oil recovery efficiently and to drain reservoirs more efficacious. By developing drilling technology, completing the oil wells as multilateral wells become more interesting especially from economic point of view. On the other hand, lack of any means for forecasting the performance of this type of wells causes drilling of them economically a risky job. The major objective of this work is to present a simple and effective means to estimate the performance of a multilateral well. In a simple approach to the multilateral well, one can consider it as several horizontal wells flowing into a common well string. By employing the concept of well interference and the Joshi's expression for horizontal well performance, a mathematical model for computing multilateral wells performance has been developed. Two correlations for estimating the multilateral well performance with odd and even branches have been presented by utilizing the concept of well interference in conjunction with a horizontal well performance expression. Consequently, the generated correlations along with the concept of equivalent length have been used in this work to present a general method for predicting a multilateral well performance. Also, economic analysis developed model for a multilateral well is presented in this paper.