A Fast Numerical Method for the Galvanic Measurement in Hydraulic Fracture Detection

Abstract

Hydraulic fracturing is critical for unconventional oil and gas production. Recently, galvanic methods, including borehole-to-surface and surface-to-borehole electromagnetic methods, have been applied in hydraulic fracture evaluation. However, conventional computational electromagnetic methods require huge computational cost to simulate the common galvanic fracture model, which consists of a long cased borehole, 3-D thin fractures, and an underground stratified medium. More seriously, modeling both vertical and horizontal energized cased boreholes in layered media is exceptionally difficult. In this article, we present a hybrid numerical mode matching method with stabilized bi-conjugate gradient fast Fourier transform method (NMM-BCGS-FFT) as the forward solver to efficiently model 3-D fractures in the galvanic survey. Both vertical and horizontal energized cased boreholes are modeled in the forward solver. The numerical results show the accuracy and efficiency of the hybrid forward solver. The realistic field galvanic detection model analysis will show the practicability of the forward solver.