The Upper Jurassic (Oxfordian to Late Kimmeridgian) Diyab Formation has served as the source rock for several world-class oil and gas fields in the Middle East. More recently it has become an emerging unconventional exploration target in United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and its age-equivalent Najhma shale member in Kuwait. The Diyab is unique in comparison to other shale plays due to its significant carbonate mineralogy, low porosities, and high pore pressures. Average measured porosities in the Diyab are generally low and the highest porosity intervals are found to be directly linked to organic porosity created by thermal maturation. Despite low overall porosities, the high carbonate and very low clay content defines an extremely brittle target, conducive to hydraulic fracture stimulation. This coupled with a high-pressure gradient facilitates a new unconventional gas exploration target in the Middle East. However, these favorable reservoir conditions come along with some challenges, including complex geomechanical properties, a challenging stress regime and the uncertainty of whether the presence of natural fractures could enhance or hinder production after hydraulic fracture treatment. Only recently has the Diyab been studied in detail in the context of an unconventional reservoir. This paper presents an integrated approach allowing a multidisciplinary characterisation of this emerging unconventional carbonate reservoir in order to gain a better understanding on the plays’ productivity controls that will aid in designing and completing future wells, but already encouraging results have been observed to date.
The Diyab play is an emerging unconventional play in the Middle East. Up to date, reservoir characterization assessments have proved adequate productivity of the play in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In this paper, an advanced simulation and modeling workflow is presented, which was applied on selected wells located on an appraisal area, by integrating geological, geomechanical, and hydraulic fracturing data. Results will be used to optimize future well landing points, well spacing and completion designs, allowing to enhance the Stimulated Rock Volume (SRV) and its consequent production. A 3D static model was built, by propagating across the appraisal area, all subsurface static properties from core-calibrated petrophysical and geomechanical logs which originate from vertical pilot wells. In addition, a Discrete Fracture Network (DFN) derived from numerous image logs was imported in the model. Afterwards, completion data from one multi-stage hydraulically fracked horizontal well was integrated into the sector model. Simulations of hydraulic fracturing were performed and the sector model was calibrated to the real hydraulic fracturing data. Different scenarios for the fracture height were tested considering uncertainties related to the fracture barriers. This has allowed for a better understanding of the fracture propagation and SRV creation in the reservoir at the main target. In the last step, production resulting from the SRV was simulated and calibrated to the field data. In the end, the calibrated parameters were applied to the newly drilled nearby horizontal wells in the same area, while they were hydraulically fractured with different completion designs and the simulated SRVs of the new wells were then compared with the one calculated on the previous well. Applying a fully-integrated geology, geomechanics, completion and production workflow has helped us to understand the impact of geology, natural fractures, rock mechanical properties and stress regimes in the SRV geometry for the unconventional Diyab play. This work also highlights the importance of data acquisition, reservoir characterization and of SRV simulation calibration processes. This fully integrated workflow will allow for an optimized completion strategy, well landing and spacing for the future horizontal wells. A fully multi-disciplinary simulation workflow was applied to the Diyab unconventional play in onshore UAE. This workflow illustrated the most important parameters impacting the SRV creation and production in the Diyab formation for he studied area. Multiple simulation scenarios and calibration runs showed how sensitive the SRV can be to different parameters and how well placement and fracture jobs can be possibly improved to enhance the SRV creation and ultimately the production performance.
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