Two-Phase Type-Curve Analysis of Flowback Data from Hydraulically Fractured Hydrocarbon Reservoirs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fengyuan Zhang ◽  
Hamid Emami-Meybodi
Keyword(s):  
Shale Gas ◽  
History Matching ◽  
Marcellus Shale ◽  
Field Application ◽  
Curve Analysis ◽  
Fracture Permeability ◽  
Two Phase ◽  
Type Curve ◽  
Fracture Properties ◽  
Curve Method

Abstract This study presents a new type-curve method to characterize hydraulic fracture (HF) attributes and dynamics by analyzing two-phase flowback data from multi-fractured horizontal wells (MFHWs) in hydrocarbon reservoirs.The proposed method includes a semianalytical model, as well as a workflow to estimate HF properties (i.e., initial fracture pore-volume and fracture permeability) and HF closure dynamics (through iterating fracture compressibility and permeability modulus).The semianalytical model considers the coupled two-phase flow in the fracture and matrix system, the variable production rate at the well, as well as the pressure-dependent reservoir and fluid properties. By incorporating the contribution of fluid influx from matrix into the fracture effective compressibility, a new set of dimensionless groups is defined to obtain a dimensionless solution for type-curve analysis. The accuracy of the proposed method is tested using the synthetic data generated from six numerical simulation cases for shale gas and oil reservoirs. The numerical validation confirms the unique behavior of type curves during fracture boundary dominated flow and verifies the accuracy of the type-curve analysis in the characterization of fracture properties. For field application, the proposed method is applied to two MFHWs in Marcellus shale gas and Eagle Ford shale oil.The agreement of interpreted results between the proposed method and straight-line analysis not only demonstrates the practicality in field application but also illustrates the superiority of the type-curve method as an easy-to-use technique to analyze two-phase flowback data. The analysis results from both of the field examples reveal the consistency in the estimated fracture properties between the proposed method and long-term history matching.

Application Investigation of Light Proppant in Hydraulic Fracturing of Marcellus Shale

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aymen Alhemdi ◽  
Ming Gu
Keyword(s):  
History Matching ◽  
Marcellus Shale ◽  
In Situ Stress ◽  
Production Performance ◽  
Well Performance ◽  
Fracture Permeability ◽  
Fracture Conductivity ◽  
Stimulated Reservoir Volume ◽  
Conductivity Distribution ◽  
Cumulative Production

Abstract Slickwater-sand fracturing design is widely employed in Marcellus shale. The slickwater- sand creates long skinny fractures and maximizes the stimulated reservoir volume (SRV). However, due to the fast settling of sand in the water, lots of upper and deeper areas are not sufficiently propped. Reducing sand size can lead to insufficient fracture conductivity. This study proposes to use three candidate ultra-lightweight proppants ULWPs to enhance the fractured well performance in unconventional reservoirs. In step 1, the current sand pumping design is input into an in-house P3D fracture propagation simulator to estimate the fracture geometry and proppant concentrations. Next, the distribution of proppant concentration converts to conductivity and then to fracture permeability. In the third step, the fracture permeability from the second step is input into a reservoir simulator to predict the cumulative production for history matching and calibration. In step 4, the three ULWPs are used to replace the sand in the frac simulator to get new frac geometry and conductivity distribution and then import them in reservoir model for production evaluation. Before this study, the three ULWPs have already been tested in the lab to obtain their long-term conductivities under in-situ stress conditions. The conductivity distribution and production performance are analyzed and investigated. The induced fracture size and location of the produced layer for the current target well play a fundamental effect on ultra-light proppant productivity. The average conductivity of ULWPs with mesh 40/70 is larger and symmetric along the fracture except for a few places. However, ULWPs with mesh 100 generates low average conductivity and create a peak conductivity in limited areas. The ULW-3 tends to have less cumulative production compared with the other ULWPs. For this Marcellus Shale study, the advantages of ultra-lightweight proppant are restricted and reduced because the upward fracture height growth is enormous. And with the presence of the hydrocarbon layer is at the bottom of the fracture, making a large proportion of ULWPs occupies areas that are not productive places. The current study provides a guidance for operators in Marcellus Shale to determine (1) If the ULWP can benefit the current shale well treated by sand, (2) what type of ULWP should be used, and (3) given a certain type of ULWP, what is the optimum pumping schedule and staging/perforating design to maximize the well productivity. The similar workflow can be expanded to evaluate the economic potential of different ULWPs in any other unconventional field.

Modeling Gas Adsorption in Marcellus Shale With Langmuir and BET Isotherms

SPE Journal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (02) ◽  
pp. 589-600 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Yu ◽  
Kamy Sepehrnoori ◽  
Tadeusz W. Patzek
Keyword(s):  
Shale Gas ◽  
Langmuir Isotherm ◽  
History Matching ◽  
Gas Adsorption ◽  
Marcellus Shale ◽  
Methane Adsorption ◽  
Gas Reservoirs ◽  
Gas Desorption ◽  
Shale Gas Reservoirs ◽  
Bet Isotherm

Summary Production from shale-gas reservoirs plays an important role in natural-gas supply in the United States. Horizontal drilling and multistage hydraulic fracturing are the two key enabling technologies for the economic development of these shale-gas reservoirs. It is believed that gas in shale reservoirs is mainly composed of free gas within fractures and pores and adsorbed gas in organic matter (kerogen). It is generally assumed in the literature that the monolayer Langmuir isotherm describes gas-adsorption behavior in shale-gas reservoirs. However, in this work, we analyzed four experimental measurements of methane adsorption from the Marcellus Shale core samples that deviate from the Langmuir isotherm, but obey the Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) isotherm. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to find that methane adsorption in a shale-gas reservoir behaves similar to multilayer adsorption. Consequently, investigation of this specific gas-desorption effect is important for accurate evaluation of well performance and completion effectiveness in shale-gas reservoirs on the basis of the BET isotherm. The difference in calculating original gas in place (OGIP) on the basis of both isotherms is discussed. We also performed history matching with one production well from the Marcellus Shale and evaluated the contribution of gas desorption to the well's performance. History matching shows that gas adsorption obeying the BET isotherm contributes more to overall gas recovery than gas adsorption obeying the Langmuir isotherm, especially at early time in production. This work provides better understanding of gas desorption in shale-gas reservoirs and updates our current analytical and numerical models for simulation of shale-gas production.

Modeling Two-Phase Flowback of Multifractured Horizontal Wells Completed in Shale

SPE Journal ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (04) ◽  
pp. 795-812 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.R.. R. Clarkson ◽  
J.D.. D. Williams-Kovacs
Keyword(s):  
Shale Gas ◽  
Transient Analysis ◽  
Horizontal Wells ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Two Phase ◽  
Fracture Properties ◽  
Rate Transient Analysis ◽  
Wellbore Storage ◽  
Fluid Production

Summary Early fluid production and flowing pressure data gathered immediately after fracture stimulation of multifractured horizontal wells may provide an early opportunity to generate long-term forecasts in shale-gas (and other hydraulically fractured) reservoirs. These early data, which often consist of hourly (if not more frequent) monitoring of fracture/formation fluid rates, volumes, and flowing pressures, are gathered on nearly every well that is completed. Additionally, fluid compositions may be monitored to determine the extent of load fluid recovery, and chemical tracers added during stage treatments to evaluate inflow from each of the stages. There is currently debate within the industry of the usefulness of these data for determining the long-term production performance of the wells. “Rules of thumb” derived from the percentage of load-fluid recovery are often used by the industry to provide a directional indication of well performance. More-quantitative analysis of the data is rarely performed; it is likely that the multiphase-flow nature of flowback and the possibility of early data being dominated by wellbore-storage effects have deterred many analysts. In this work, the use of short-term flowback data for quantitative analysis of induced-hydraulic-fracture properties is critically evaluated. For the first time, a method for analyzing water and gas production and flowing pressures associated with the flowback of shale-gas wells, to obtain hydraulic-fracture properties, is presented. Previous attempts have focused on single-phase analysis. Examples from the Marcellus shale are analyzed. The short (less than 48 hours) flowback periods were followed by long-term pressure buildups (approximately 1 month). Gas + water production data were analyzed with analytical simulation and rate-transient analysis methods designed for analyzing multiphase coalbed-methane (CBM) data. This analogy is used because two-phase flowback is assumed to be similar to simultaneous flow of gas and water during long-term production through the fracture system of coal. One interpretation is that the early flowback data correspond to wellbore + fracture volume depletion (storage). It is assumed that fracture-storage volume is much greater than wellbore storage. This flow regime appears consistent with what is interpreted from the long-term pressure-buildup data, and from the rate-transient analysis of flowback data. Assuming further that the complex fracture network created during stimulation is confined to a region around perforation clusters in each stage, one can see that fluid-production data can be analyzed with a two-phase tank-model simulator to determine fracture permeability and drainage area, the latter being interpreted to obtain an effective (producing) fracture half-length given geometrical considerations. Total fracture half-length, derived from rate-transient analysis of online (post-cleanup) data, verifies the flowback estimates. An analytical forecasting tool that accounts for multiple sequences of post-storage linear flow, followed by late-stage boundary flow, was developed to forecast production with flowback-derived parameters, volumetric inputs, matrix permeability, completion data, and operating constraints. The preliminary forecasts are in very good agreement with online production data after several months of production. The use of flowback data to generate early production forecasts is therefore encouraging, but needs to be tested for a greater data set for this shale play and for other plays, and should not be used for reserves forecasting.

Experiences With Streamline-Based Three-Phase History Matching

2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (04) ◽  
pp. 528-541 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adedayo Oyerinde ◽  
Akhil Datta-Gupta ◽  
William J. Milliken
Keyword(s):  
History Matching ◽  
Field Application ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Time Inversion ◽  
Two Phase ◽  
Major Drawback ◽  
Three Phase ◽  
Production History ◽  
Water Cut ◽  
Matching Techniques

Summary Streamline-based assisted and automatic history matching techniques have shown great potential in reconciling high resolution geologic models to production data. However, a major drawback of these approaches has been incompressibility or slight compressibility assumptions that have limited applications to two-phase water/oil displacements only. Recent generalization of streamline models to compressible flow has greatly expanded the scope and applicability of streamline-based history matching, in particular for three-phase flow. In our previous work, we calibrated geologic models to production data by matching the water cut (WCT) and gas/oil ratio (GOR) using the generalized travel-time inversion (GTTI) technique. For field applications, however, the highly nonmonotonic profile of the GOR data often presents a challenge to this technique. In this work we present a transformation of the field production data that makes it more amenable to GTTI. Further, we generalize the approach to incorporate bottomhole flowing pressure during three-phase history matching. We examine the practical feasibility of the method using a field-scale synthetic example (SPE-9 comparative study) and a field application. The field case is a highly faulted, west-African reservoir with an underlying aquifer. The reservoir is produced under depletion with three producers, and over thirty years of production history. The simulation model has several pressure/volume/temperature (PVT) and special core analysis (SCAL) regions and more than 100,000 cells. The GTTI is shown to be robust because of its quasilinear properties as demonstrated by the WCT and GOR match for a period of 30 years of production history.

scholarly journals Triple-Porosity Modelling for the Simulation of Multiscale Flow Mechanisms in Shale Reservoirs

Geofluids ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingyao Wei ◽  
Jishan Liu ◽  
Derek Elsworth ◽  
Enyuan Wang
Keyword(s):  
Shale Gas ◽  
History Matching ◽  
Gas Transport ◽  
Gas Production ◽  
Natural Fracture ◽  
System Matrix ◽  
Fracture Permeability ◽  
Gas Reservoir ◽  
Apparent Permeability ◽  
Shale Reservoir

Shale gas reservoir is a typical type of unconventional gas reservoir, primarily because of the complex flow mechanism from nanoscale to macroscale. A triple-porosity model (M3 model) comprising kerogen system, matrix system, and natural fracture system was presented to describe the multispace scale, multitime scale, and multiphysics characteristic of gas flows in shale reservoir. Apparent permeability model for real gas transport in nanopores, which covers flow regime effect and geomechanical effect, was used to address multiscale flow in shale matrix. This paper aims at quantifying the shale gas in different scales and its sequence in the process of gas production. The model results used for history matching also showed consistency against gas production data from the Barnett Shale. It also revealed the multispace scale process of gas production from a single well, which is supplied by gas transport from natural fracture, matrix, and kerogen sequentially. Sensitivity analysis on the contributions of shale reservoir permeability in different scales gives some insight as to their importance. Simulated results showed that free gas in matrix contributes to the main source of gas production, while the performance of a gas shale well is strongly determined by the natural fracture permeability.

scholarly journals Investigation of the Effect of Natural Fractures on Multiple Shale-Gas Well Performance Using Non-Intrusive EDFM Technology

Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 932 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Yu ◽  
Xiaohu Hu ◽  
Malin Liu ◽  
Weihong Wang
Keyword(s):  
Shale Gas ◽  
History Matching ◽  
Natural Fracture ◽  
Fracture Density ◽  
Natural Fractures ◽  
Well Performance ◽  
Two Phase ◽  
Gas Well ◽  
Discrete Fracture Model ◽  
Well Spacing

The influence of complex natural fractures on multiple shale-gas well performance with varying well spacing is poorly understood. It is difficult to apply the traditional local grid refinement with structured or unstructured gridding techniques to accurately and efficiently handle complex natural fractures. In this study, we introduced a powerful non-intrusive embedded discrete fracture model (EDFM) technology to overcome the limitations of exiting methods. Through this unique technology, complex fracture configurations can be easily and explicitly embedded into structured matrix blocks. We set up a field-scale two-phase reservoir model to history match field production data and predict long-term recovery from Marcellus. The effective fracture properties were determined thorough history matching. In addition, we extended the single-well model to include two horizontal wells with and without including natural fractures. The effects of different numbers of natural fractures on two-well performance with varying well spacing of 200 m, 300 m, and 400 m were examined. The simulation results illustrate that gas productivity almost linearly increases with the number of two-set natural fractures. Furthermore, the difference of well performance between different well spacing increases with an increase in natural fracture density. A larger well spacing is preferred for economically developing the shale-gas reservoirs with a larger natural fracture density. The findings of this study provide key insights into understanding the effect of natural fractures on well performance and well spacing optimization.

An Investigation of Pressure and Production Data Using Decline and Type Curve Analysis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arifur Rahman ◽  
Fatema Akter Happy ◽  
Mahbub Alam Hira ◽  
M. Enamul Hossain
Keyword(s):  
History Matching ◽  
Fractured Reservoirs ◽  
Curve Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Type Curve ◽  
Type Curves ◽  
Decline Curve Analysis ◽  
Decline Curve ◽  
Analysis Technique

Decline curve analysis is one of the most widely used production data analysis technique for forecasting whilst type curve analysis is a graphical representation technique for history matching and forecasting. The combination of both methods can estimate the reserves and the well/reservoir parameters simultaneously. The purpose of this study is to construct the new production decline curves to analyze the pressure and production data. These curves are constructed by combining decline curve and a type curve analysis technique that can estimate the existing reserves and determine the other well/reservoir parameters for gas wells. The accuracy of these parameter estimations depends on the quality and type of the pressure and production data available. This study illustrates the conventional decline curve that can be used to analyze the gas well performance data with type curves based on pseudo time function. On the other hand, log-log plots are used as a diagnostic tool to identify the appropriate reservoir model and analogous data trend. Pressure derivative and type curves are used to construct a radial model of the reservoir. In addition, Blasingame and Fetkovich type curves analysis are also presented in a convenient way. The decline curve analysis shows steady state production for a long time, then a decline is observed which indicates a boundary dominated flow. The Blasingame type curve matching points is going downward, which indicate the influence of another nearby well. The reservoir parameters that are obtained by using the decline curve and type curves analysis show a similar trend and close match for different approaches. These observations closely match results of different analysis. This analysis improves the likelihood of the results being satisfactory and reliable, though it changes with time until the end of the production period. This analysis technique can be extended to other type of well/reservoir system, including horizontal wells and fractured reservoirs.

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