Study of production enhancement through wettability alteration in a super-giant gas-condensate reservoir

Abstract Near wellbore condensate blockage phenomena commonly reduce gas production significantly. One efficient method for overcoming such problem is wettability alteration. Such issues as wettability state, treatment radius and time to reach the maximum level of production need be optimized prior to field application. In this paper, impact of these parameters are studied on gas and condensate production enhancement through wettability alteration. To do this, behavior of a well located in supergiant offshore Iranian gas condensate field is simulated and analyzed using a compositional model, single well and radial grid. The real fluid and reservoir properties of the studied well are utilized to construct the model. Different wettability states were defined using various relative permeability curves at various distances from the wellbore along with different treatment times are tested to find the best condition. Results indicate that near-wellbore wettability alteration leads to lower critical condensate saturation which has a significant impact on improving production parameters and reservoir recovery factors. Also, the highest recovery factor is achieved at optimal conditions where wettability is altered from strong liquid-wet to intermediate-wet at the small radius around the production well in early times. Furthermore, the inflow performance relationship curve (IPR) moves upward considerably which represents the magnificent production improvement.