Upscaling of Tightly Spaced Hydraulic Fractures and Microseismic Mapping at the Hydraulic Fracturing Test Site
Abstract
Core samples retrieved from the Hydraulic Fracturing Test Site (HFTS) in the Permian Basin show the existence of numerous tightly spaced, parallel, or sub-parallel hydraulic fractures that form swarms. Many fractures are clustered with sub-foot inter-fracture spacing, posing a great challenge to the traditional practice of reservoir stimulation modeling in which a single hydraulic fracture is usually assumed to initiate from each perforation cluster (Fu et al. 2020). It is impractical to explicitly model numerous, tightly-spaced fractures at the field scale. Here we develop an upscaling law that reduces computational complexity by approximating a group of tightly spaced hydraulic fractures with one monolithic fracture. Specifically, the upscaling approach ensures adequate representation of the fracture geometry, fluid pressure, and mechanical response of the reservoir utilizing upscaled fracture toughness, fluid viscosity, proppant size, and fluid leak-off coefficient in the numerical simulation. In addition, detailed quantitative analysis is performed using the microseismic data of multiple horizontal wells at the HFTS to provide estimations of fracture geometries by stage. We demonstrate that the conventional modeling approach, without upscaling, tends to generate excessively fast fracture propagation compared to the microseismic estimations. The upscaling approach reduces this discrepancy and captures observed variations in fracture height growth for different stimulation depths. The upscaling approach can be readily incorporated into existing simulation tools to enable efficient resolution of dense hydraulic fracture propagation or integrated with microseismic monitoring to help predict fracture development.
Reference: Fu, W., Morris, J.P., Fu, P., Huang, J., Sherman, C.S., Settgast, R.R., Wu, H., Ryerson, F.J., 2020. Developing Upscaling Approach for Swarming Hydraulic Fractures Observed at Hydraulic Fracturing Test Site Through Multiscale Simulations, SPE Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference and Exhibition, Society of Petroleum Engineers, The Woodlands, Texas, USA. SPE-199689-MS. NOTICE: This work is performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy, Office of Oil and Natural Gas. The United States Government retains, and the publisher, by accepting the abstract for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this abstract, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMH060.0005F
- Keywords:
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- 1829 Groundwater hydrology;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1832 Groundwater transport;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1859 Rocks: physical properties;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 3225 Numerical approximations and analysis;
- MATHEMATICAL GEOPHYSICS