Oil well production analysis started with empirical relationships exactly where Well

Test Interpretation stopped. In the 1920 PA started with Arnold and Cutler , Who
implemented empirical relations
for economic purpose but with no physical relation to actual reservoir engineering.
The objective was more or less to find the right scale , draw a straight line and
extrapolate.
Things improved marginally with Arps in the 1940s, with the formulation of
constant pressure exponential, hyperbolic and harmonic decline responses: The first
log-log, well test style type-curves came with Fetkovich in the 1970s , still assuming
constant flowing pressure at a time where the well test community was moving
towards superposition/convolution of the flow rates.
FETKOVICH DECLINE TYPE-CURVES
The superposition and derivative came ten years later, with the work of Blasingame
et al. When a new presentation was proposed, with normalized rate pressure
instead of normalized pressure rate values: At this stage, Production analysis had, in
theory, caught up with PT methodology . In reality, day to day Production analysis
remained, until recently, constrained to the old tools implemented to serve
production databases. Basically, look at the rates, not at the pressures, hence
missing the corrective factor to perform a rigorous diagnostic of the data. When
forward thinking people wanted to use both pressure and rate for analysis of the
production responses, they would enter the data in a well test analysis package. But
this approach had inherent errors as assumptions made in well test interpretation
are not necessarily valid or appropriate over production time scales.
The move to modern Production analysis and corresponding commercial is recent. It
came from the dual requirements of performing classic decline analysis on a
personal computer (PC), and permanent surface and downhole pressure gauges,
making real analysis using both production and pressure data.
Permanent downhole gauges in Oil well production analysis
With the increasingly frequent installation and use of permanent downhole gauges
(PDG) and other measuring instruments we are receiving data at a high acquisition
rate and over a long time interval. Put crudely, If we multiply high frequency by long
duration we get a huge number of data points; typically 20 million,
not sometimes up to 300 million. Conversely, the number of data points needed for
an analysis is much less. They are of two types :
1. Low frequency data for production analysis and history matching . If rates are
acquired daily, a pressure point per hour will do. This means less than 100,000
points for ten years.

2. High frequency data or Pressure Transient Analysis. Assuming 100 build-ups wih
1000 points extracted on a logarithmic time scale for analysis coincidentally this is
another, albeit different, 100,000 points.
So even for the largest data sets, 200,000points are plenty to cope with the
required processing, for instance, two orders of magnitude less than the median
size of the actual raw data set, unlike the size of the raw data, 200,000 points is
well within the processing capability of todays PC. But we need some smart filtering
algorithms to obtain these points.