X Field located in the United Arab Emirates has been developed since 1970's by waterflooding as

secondaryrecovery strategy. As water front advances into oil bank, the well operation practice
commonly adopted inmany fields for oil wells cutting water has consisted in reducing choke
aperture in an attempt to controlthe water cut trend. However, in wells producing moderate to
high water cut, this practice has proven togenerate excess water settling in the bottom of the
wellbore leading to premature inactivation of the wells.
The reservoir Z in the north of X Field, is a black oil block operated by peripheral and
patternwaterflooding. The production wells have been operating by natural lifting since first oil
and will continuein natural flow until the Artificial Lift projects are commissioned within a few
years. Meanwhile, the fieldproduction plateau has been increased arising challenges of production
sustainability due to higher risk ofacceleration of water breakthrough and consequently higher
number of wells becoming inactive earlier.This led to re-assess the Well and Reservoir
management strategy to define improved practices oriented tomaximize the natural life cycle of
wet wells and ensure the compliance of the field production quota. As aresult, a new well
management approach was devised and adopted to identify and optimize at the earlieststage,
wells potentially affected by water loading mismanage. Conceptually, this new practice consisted
incomprehensively analyzing well operating conditions, which ultimately generated a flow
operating windowthat improved the multiphase flow performance in wellbores, minimized water
slippage avoiding it to settledown and its associated problems, whilst respecting the compliance
of technical guidelines for optimumreservoir management.
Based on observations and data gathered from portable testing jobs, saturation logs, PLT and
productionmonitoring; a methodology referred in this work as Critical Flow Analysis, has been
successfullyimplemented in several naturally flowing wells with water cuts ranging from 15 – 40
% in Reservoir Z inX Field, which resulted in prolonged natural life, extra oil recovered, and
avoided the negative impact ofinactive string count on the Field Management KPI.
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