Mathematical model predicting the fluid production from a reservoir based on the past production/injection history.
It can be applied to any fluid production: water, oil gas or total production.
It does not involve the knowledge of formation pressure or bottom-hole pressure and is solely based on production/injection history data.
This comes as advantage in quick estimation of production perspectives and as disadvantage in accurate long-terms predictions.
There are many popular decline metrics, including the most popular:
| Arps | conventional reservoirs |
| Duong | tight gas, shales |
| Power Law | tight gas, shales |
| Multi-segment | wide-range |
| Neural-Network | wide-range |
The first historically and the most popular decline curve methodology in conventional reservoirs is Arps decline model:
| Fig. 1. Arp's Exponential decline | Fig. 2. Arp's Harmonic decline | Fig. 3. Arp's Hyperbolic decline |
See Also
Petroleum Industry / Upstream / Production / Subsurface Production / Field Study & Modelling / Production Analysis