Challenge to the improvement of sand production prediction methods in production and injection wells

Abstract

Sand production is one of the most serious production problems encountering during the development of sandstone fields. In Japan, the production tests were terminated due to sand production-related issues during the first and second offshore production tests of methane hydrates in the Nankai Trough. It has been reported that sand production occurs not only in production wells but also in injection wells. With a growing interest in CCS and CCUS, sand control is considered one of the most important well design elements for CO₂ injection wells when drilled in sandstone reservoirs. The selection of the optimum sand control methods requires accurately predicting the onset of sand production and the volume of produced sand as well as thorough well performance evaluation. In this presentation, we reviewed recent advances in sand production prediction approaches such as sand production experiments using a true triaxial compression test apparatus, formation failure analysis using an elastoplastic finite element method model, and semi-analytical sand rate prediction model based on field sand rate measurements.