Simplification of complex fracture morphology and its impact on production
by Palash Panja; Jing Zhou; Milind Deo
International Journal of Oil, Gas and Coal Technology (IJOGCT), Vol. 23, No. 2, 2020

Abstract: Significant amounts of oil and natural gas in the USA are produced from fractured reservoirs. Fracture morphology and effectiveness of fracturing job depend on various factors such as geological properties (permeability, porosity, and heterogeneity), mechanical properties (Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio, stress anisotropy, maximum horizontal stress) and fracturing operational parameters (fluid injection rate, fluid viscosity). Reservoir engineer's job is to import the fracture geometry into reservoir flow simulator in order to forecast the production of hydrocarbons to evaluate a play's potential. In this research, various issues related to simplification of rigorously-generated fractures are investigated. A systematic approach including practical flow consideration in hydraulic fracture with heterogeneous permeability and width along the length is developed. The complex fractures morphology is simplified in two proposed models with mathematical formulations. Simplified models show promising alternatives in rapid forecasting of production of hydrocarbon without losing the characteristic of fracture properties like complex morphology and bottleneck. Oil recovery, cumulative gas oil ratio (GOR), oil rate and average reservoir pressure are compared with results from complex fracture morphology. One field case is used to demonstrate the validity of the method. [Received: May 9, 2017; Accepted: March 23, 2018]

Online publication date: Mon, 02-Mar-2020

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