A Novel Methodology to Optimise the Parameters of Hydraulic Fracturing in Gas Condensate Reservoirs

Abstract

When the pressure falls below the dew point in a condensate reservoir, condensate banking starts build up adjacent to the wellbore, the relative permeability of gas closes to the wellbore badly affected, ultimately causes the reduction in the well productivity index. In these cases, the influence of condensate blockage can be abridged by enhancing the inflow area and attaining linear flow rather than radial flow in the wellbore proximity. These characteristics can only be accomplished by conducting hydraulic fracturing job. However, the performance of hydraulic fracturing treatment is highly dependent on the operational parameters. Estimation of optimal operational parameters of hydraulic fracturing is typically a difficult job for reservoir engineers. Enhancing the fracture half-length improves the well productivity but this scenario is misleading sometime. Fracture face skin is always associated with the fracture length that may induce additional pressure drop surrounding the fracture and can cause the gas condensate buildup. This happen because as the length of the fracture increases the damage surrounds the fracture cause by permeability impairment also increases, so there must be an optimum fracture length above which increasing the length of fracture is no more efficacious. This research work presents a new methodology to quantify the amount of fracture face skin associated with the length of the fracture and determine optimum parameter for hydraulic fracturing in a gas condensate reservoir. To achieve the objective of this study a gas condensate simulation model has been created and the parameters associated with the hydraulic fracturing has been deeply investigated, particle swarm optimization has been used as an optimization technique to optimize the parameters that has been investigated. After optimizing the parameters, the new approach has been proposed that suggests the optimum fracture parameters. This new approach is highly promising and can serve as very handy tool for reservoir engineers to determine the optimum operational hydraulic fracturing treatment parameters for a gas condensate reservoir.