Coupled Versus Stratified Flow of Water and Hydrocarbon During Flowback and Post-flowback Processes

Abstract

Abstract Pore-scale images and core-scale imbibition experiments suggest that hydrocarbon and water tend to flow through their own pore network, referred to as "stratified flow". The objective of this paper is to investigate the occurrence of these phenomena at reservoir scale by analyzing flowback and post-flowback production data. Understanding multiphase flow regimes is the first step for selecting proper relative permeability curves and developing representative multiphase rate-transient models. Another objective of this paper is to investigate the harmonic decline (HD) behavior of water-oil ratio (WOR) versus cumulative water production volume and how it could be employed to compare load recovery performance of different wells. We analyzed flowback and post-flowback production data of six multi-fractured horizontal oil wells completed in Eagleford Formation. The proposed data-driven methodology involves using multiphase diagnostic plots of rate-normalized pressure, rate decline, and WOR. We applied this methodology to i) investigate the relationship between water and hydrocarbon at early production time; ii) model WOR with respect to cumulative water production; and iii) evaluate how fracturing/completion design parameters affect well performance. The results show three key findings: i) During early production time, we observe independent flow regimes (stratified flow) of water and oil indicating their production under different drive mechanisms. Water is produced from an apparently closed tank comprising induced fractures and the surrounding stimulated matrix, and oil is produced independently at a significantly lower rate due to oil influx from matrix into fractures. ii) After jet-pump installation, we observe coupled flow of water and oil indicating their production under similar drive mechanisms provided by the pump. iii) Semi-log plot of WOR versus cumulative water production shows HD trend that is relatively less sensitive to operational changes compared to water rate-decline plots.