Author : Irfan Ali Memon, Abdul haque Tunio , Masood Ahmed Bhatti

Miocene or younger sands are major source of sand production, these type of formations are mostly unconsolidated or only partially consolidated with soft clay or silt, and these formations are structurally weak. These weak formations may not detain sand particle movement, and produce along with the hydrocarbon fluids at high rates. This undesirable sand production can cause many different problems at surface as well as at sub-surface. An effective way of dealing with this problem is the use of gravel pack technique. However, designing gravel pack treatment requires consideration of different influencing parameters. This research aims to study the performance of gravel pack along with the gravel pack height and permeability on the well flow. The approach taken in this study includes the well performance modeling using a commercial simulator. A filed data is collected for gas condensate well that is being produced from Lower Goru Massive Sand Formation. The collected field data is simulated to compare the performance of Gas Condensate well before and after gravel pack completion. With this, the analysis is carried out to determine the effect of gravel pack height & permeability on flow parameters (i.e; flow rates of fluids, sand control losses, frictional losses, sand control skin, gravel pack critical velocity). Lastly, an appropriate height and permeable gravel is recommended on the basis of simulation results.

Keywords: sand production, gravel pack, sands, well performance modeling, commercial simulator