Title: Simplification of complex fracture morphology and its impact on production

Authors: Palash Panja; Jing Zhou; Milind Deo

Addresses: Energy and Geoscience Institute, University of Utah, 423 Wakara Way, Suite #300, Salt Lake City, Utah, 84108, USA ' Idaho National Laboratory, 2525 Fremont Ave, Idaho Falls, Idaho 83402, USA ' Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Utah, 50 South Central Campus Drive, 3290 MEB, Salt Lake City, Utah, 84102, USA

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]

Keywords: fracture morphology; simplified fracture models; bottleneck of flow; oil recovery; gas oil ratio; GOR.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOGCT.2020.105458

International Journal of Oil, Gas and Coal Technology, 2020 Vol.23 No.2, pp.143 - 168

Received: 09 May 2017
Accepted: 23 Mar 2018
Published online: 02 Mar 2020 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article