A Novel Technique on Microseismic - EDFM Fracture Modeling and Calibration for Complex Fractures in Unconventional Reservoirs

Abstract

Abstract Hydraulic fracture models are useful mechanisms to understand reservoir properties and performance in unconventional reservoirs. The inclusion of field measurements can further refine hydraulic fracture models by providing key information to optimize field development planning. Microseismic data remains as one of the most accessible types of field data, which can help understanding reservoir extension. Additionally, microseismic data is useful to assess well interference and extracting average hydraulic fracture geometry. However, an efficient method to extract cluster-based hydraulic fracture models from microseismic data is absent due to loss of spatial accuracy of current techniques when used in reservoir simulations. Moreover, accessibility to hydraulic fracture propagation simulators may add up to the challenge of producing reliable and fast estimates of fracture geometry. In this paper, our main objective is to efficiently reconstruct a hydraulic fracture model using microseismic data and combine it with a history matching workflow in order to optimize field development planning in a shale gas well. We created a fast and efficient cluster-based hydraulic fracture reconstruction tool, which uses microseismic events’ spatial distribution to create hydraulic fracture models represented by the embedded discrete fracture model (EDFM). Our workflow can include different sets of discrete fracture network (DFN) models, in order to assess their interactions with hydraulic fractures. We used two different DFN models: original DFN model and DFN represented by the activation of natural fractures during well stimulation. Finally, we calibrated our hydraulic fracture and DFN models to production data. We efficiently modeled the effective hydraulic fracture geometry that contributes to production by including spatial cut-off coefficients, which reduce fracture geometry in the history matching process. The results of this novel workflow produce not only efficiently calibrated hydraulic fracture models, but provides valuable insights regarding hydraulic fracture geometry and their interaction with natural fractures. Additionally, the inclusion of cut-off coefficients allows to model the effective contribution of hydraulic fractures after calibrating fracture geometry with production data.