In recent years, sand production has been frequently observed in offshore weakly consolidated sandstone reservoirs. Permeability changes due to sand migration seriously affect the confidence in well test interpretation, production forecasts, and oilfield development plan schedules. The purpose of this paper is to propose a comprehensive model of coupled sand migration, stress sensitivity, and high viscosity oil and to study the effect of sand production induced permeability zoning on transient pressure behavior by combining discrete boundary and discrete wellbore with the boundary element method. In this two-zone composite model, the reservoir can be divided into the inner zone with the improved permeability due to sand migration and the outer zone with initial reservoir permeability. The multifactor effects of stress-sensitive, highly viscous oil, sand migration, and horizontal well are included in this model. Thus, the seepage equation presents a highly nonlinear and difficult to obtain an accurate analytical solution. In this paper, the boundary element method (BEM) is introduced to separate the boundary and wellbore, and the semianalytical solution of the hybrid model is obtained. The comparative analysis of measured pressure curve fitting from a horizontal well, located in the eastern of the South China Sea, proves that this comprehensive model can be used for pressure transient analysis of the weakly consolidated sandstone reservoir. The flow regime analysis indicates that a two-zone composite system may develop seven flow regimes: the wellbore storage stage, early-time radial stage, first transition stage, inner linear stage, inner pseudoradial flow, transition flow from the inner area to the outer area, and outer pseudoradial flow. Sensitivity analysis indicates that the smaller the sand production radius, the shorter the duration of the transition flow from the inner to the outer zone, which suggests the well is mainly affected by the outer boundary in the later period. The larger the permeability ratio, the higher the pressure curves may move up.

For unconsolidated sanding wells, the interaction between sanding and pressure-dependent permeability as oil is produced from the bottom of the well puts higher challenges on the evaluation and prediction of well performance. Therefore, it is essential to assess the oil well performance considering the synthetic effect of stress-sensitive and produced sand particles. In this paper, a new stress-sensitive factor is proposed to describe the relationship between stress and permeability in the numerical model. Also, based on the rectangular plastic region by the sand migration near the perforation, a quantitative expression of the sanding area for numerical model calculation was established. Combined with a quantitative description of these two key parameters, a sand-producing horizontal well model is established to evaluate production performance. In this model, the area of sand production near the wellbore is considered as the inner area with increased permeability while the outer zone remains the original reservoir. Besides, the model was verified by the production data from the sand-producing horizontal well in the oilfield. Furthermore, sensitivity parameters (such as stress sensitivity, the size of sanding zone, well location, and reservoir boundaries) are used to make the analysis of well productivity, which provides a theoretical basis for petroleum engineers to adjust the development plan for horizontal wells in the weakly consolidated sandstone reservoir.