Physical Models for Inter-Well Interference in Shale Reservoirs: Relative Impacts of Fracture Hits and Matrix Permeability

Abstract

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Shale Reservoir Drainage Visualized for a Wolfcamp Well (Midland Basin, West Texas, USA)

“…The first new insight is that using pressure plots as a proxy for reservoir depletion zones can be misleading. Pressure plots traditionally used to show the depletion of hydrocarbon reservoirs generally suggest that large areas are drained by hydraulically fractured wells [10][11][12]. Our present study shows that velocity plots and drained area plots reveal much more detail about the hydrocarbon migration in shale reservoirs than pressure plots alone.…”

Fracture Detection and Numerical Modeling for Fractured Reservoirs

“…Efficient simulation methods of modeling fractured reservoirs include analytical methods, semianalytical methods [6,8,27], and numerical methods [31,32]. The dual-porosity/dual-permeability approach is also often applied to model complex fractures and simulate the effect of fracture networks.…”

“…Zhou et al [27] designed a semianalytical model to simulate the gas production in Barnett shale with fully penetrated planar fractures. Yu et al [8] extended Zhou's model to simulate well production for reservoirs with fully a penetrated non-planar fracture as well as a planar fracture with varying fracture width and fracture permeability. Their model was verified with a numerical reservoir simulator for a single fracture case before being applied to several case studies based on Marcellus shale properties.…”

“…Fracture quantification and fracture modeling are very important in many disciplines of earth sciences, such as geophysics, petroleum and rock mechanics. Different combinations of fracture properties and rock matrix properties will generate different flow storage and transport mechanisms in the fractured reservoirs [3][4][5][6][7][8]. For example, in the case of high matrix porosity and low matrix permeability, the majority of hydrocarbon will be stored in the matrix, but fractures will act as the transport channel for producing wells.…”

“…The fracture lines and their intersection points are detected and calculated. After detecting fractures lines and providing input data for two reservoir simulation methods, the semianalytical model [8,27] and numerical methods with the Embedded Discrete Fracture Model (EDFM) [28] implemented, the pressure profile of the reservoir is computed.…”