Al Sayed Ghareeb’s scientific contributions

The applications of horizontal well technology in developing hydrocarbon reservoirs have been widely used in recent years. One of the main objectives of using this technology is to improve hydrocarbon recovery from water and/or gas-cap drive reservoirs. The advantages of using a horizontal well over a conventional vertical well are their larger capacity to produce oil at the same drawdown and a longer breakthrough time at a given production rate. Coning is a term used to describe the mechanism underlying the upward movement of water and/ or the down movement of gas into the perforations of a producing well. Coning can seriously impact the well productivity and influence the degree of depletion and the overall recovery efficiency of the oil reservoirs. Delaying the encroachment and production of gas and water are essentially the controlling factors in maximizing the field's ultimate oil recovery. Since coning can have an important influence on operations, recovery, and economics, it is the objective of this paper to develop a computer program for calculating the critical oil (or gas) rate to avoid coning of unwanted fluids into production wells and to predict the behavior of water and gas coning in horizontal wells.